MAIN   LIBRARY 


3 


VACATION  CAMPING 
FOR  GIRLS 


VACATION 

CAMPING  FOR 

GIRLS 


By 
JtANNtTTE.   MARKS 


• 


ILLUSTRATED 
• 

NE.W  YORK  AND  LONDON 
D.  APPLLTON  AND  COMPANY 

1913 


COPYRIGHT,  igi3,  BY 
D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 


Copyright,  1912,  by  DAVID  C.  COOK  PUBLISHING  COMPANY 


LISRARV 


.    .     • 

I       I 

\.       *  * 

•       * 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  CAMPING  CHECK  LISTS     ....  i 

II.  CAMP  CLOTHES 13 

III.  FOOD 24 

IV.  COOK  AND  COOKEE 37 

V.  LOG-CABIN  COOKERY 46 

VI.  THE  PLACE  TO  CAMP 68 

VII.  CAMP  FIRES 77 

VIII.  OTHER  SMOKE 87 

IX.  FITTING  Up  THE  CAMP  FOR  USE    .  94 

X.  THE  POCKETBOOK 107 

XI.  THE  CAMP  DOG 118 

XII.  THE  OUTDOOR  TRAINING  SCHOOL  .  127 

XIII.  THE  CAMP  HABIT 139 

XIV.  CAMP  CLEANLINESS 147 

XV.  WOOD    CULTURE   AND    CAMP 

HEALTH 157 

XVI.  WILDERNESS    SILENCE 171 

XVII.  HOME-MADE  CAMPING 181 

XVIII.  THE  CANOE  AND  FISHING     .     .     .  193 

XIX.  THE  TRAIL 209 

XX.  CAMP   DON'TS  221 


434.15.1 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Camp  Footgear 15 

A  Group  of  Camp  Utensils 33 

Nessmuk  Range  and  Small  Cook  Fire  ...     79 

Sleeping  Bags  and  Camp  Cot 99 

A  Group  of  Tents 109 

Bough  Lean-to  and  Frame 113 

Some  Game  and  Water  Birds 131 

Birds  Every  Camper  Should  Know  .     .     .     .135 

Leaves  of  Familiar  Trees 137 

Some  Common  Fish 199 

Fishing  Tackle 201 

Rod  Case,  Tackle  Case,  Net  and  Creel  .     .     .  205 

Angling  Knots 207 

The  Dipper 213 

Moose,  Buck,  Doe,  Fawn  and  Caribou  .     .     .215 
Animals  the  Camper  May  Meet 217 


i'.ii  -. 

•  ,-  -  . 

* 


VACATION    CAMPING 
FOR  GIRLS 

CHAPTER    I 

CAMPING  CHECK  LISTS 

THERE  are  some  considerations  in 
camping  which  are  staple;  that 
is,  questions  and  needs  all  of  us 
have  to  meet,  just  as  there  are  staple  foods 
which  all  of  us  must  have.  No  one  knows 
better  than  the  old  camper,  who  has  shaken 
down  his  ideas,  theories,  practices,  year  after 
year  in  the  experiment  of  camping  how  true 
this  is.  If  one  is  wise,  one  goes  well  pre- 
pared even  into  the  simple  life  of  the  woods 
or  mountains  or  lakes;  and  it  is  in  a  prac- 
tical way,  and  under  three  so-called  check 
lists,  (i)  camp  clothes,  (2)  camp  food,  and 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 


(3)  camp  equipment,  that  I  wish  to  tell  you 
something  about  camp  life  for  girls. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  clothes  there 
are  two  kinds  of  camping:  one  more  or  less 
civilized,  the  other  "rough."  In  the  first 
perhaps  we  shall  be  allowed  a  small 
box  or  trunk.  In  the  second  we  have  to 
depend  entirely  upon  a  duffle  bag  or  a  knap- 
sack. To  the  camper  who  plans  for  a  good 
many  comforts,  there  is  only  one  warning 
to  be  given:  don't  be  foolish  and  take  finery 
of  any  sort  with  you.  Not  only  will  it  be 
in  the  way,  but  also  a  girl  does  not  look  well 
in  the  woods  dressed  in  clothes  that  belong 
to  the  home  life  of  town  or  city. 

There  is  an  appropriate  garb  for  the  wil- 
derness even  as  there  is  the  right  gown  for 
an  afternoon  tea.  Except  for  this  warning, 
what  you  will  put  in  your  trunk  will  be  sim- 
ply an  extension  of  the  comforts  which  you 
have  in  duffle  bag  or  knapsack. 

As  the  capacity  of  duffle  bag  or  knapsack 


CAMPING    CHECK    LISTS 

is  very  limited,  the  check  lists  for  its  con- 
tents must  be  made  out  with  rigid  economy. 
The  most  important  item  is  foot  gear.  A 
well-made  pair  of  medium  weight  boots, 
carefully  tanned,  drenched  with  mutton  tal- 
low, viscol,  neat's-foot  oil,  or  some  similar 
waterproof  substance,  will  prove  the  best  for 
all-round  usefulness.  These  boots  must  be 
broken  in  or  worn  before  the  camping  ex- 
pedition is  undertaken.  Nothing  is  so  fool- 
ish as  to  start  out  in  a  new  pair.  Have  in 
addition  to  the  boots  a  pair  of  soft  indoor 
moccasins.  These  are  good  to  loaf  around 
camp  in.  They  are  grateful  to  tired  feet, 
and,  rolled,  take  up  but  little  space  in  the 
knapsack.  To  the  boots  and  moccasins  add 
from  two  to  four  pairs  of  hole-proof  stock- 
ings of  some  reliable  make.  If  you  can  get 
a  really  first-class  stocking  and  are  crowded 
for  space,  two  pairs  will  do.  One  goes  on 
to  your  feet  and  the  other  into  your  knap- 
sack. There  should  also  be  several  combi- 

3 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

nation  suits,  preferably  of  two  weights,  high 
necked,  and  with  shoulder  and  knee  caps. 

Now,  see  that  the  skirt  you  wear  is  of 
durable  material;  blue  serge  or  tweed  (cor- 
duroy is  often  too  heavy)  ;  that  it  has  been 
thoroughly  shrunk,  and  is  six  inches  off  the 
ground  anyway.  Twelve  would  be  better. 
Your  skirt  should  be  provided  with  ample 
pockets;  the  sweater  and  jacket  also.  Un- 
der the  skirt  wear  a  pair  of  bloomers,  the 
lighter  and  slimsier  they  are,  the  better;  and 
the  stouter  the  material,  the  more  practical 
for  wear.  I  have  tried  many  kinds,  and  be- 
lieve percaline  which  is  light,  strong,  slimsy 
and  washable,  the  best.  Silk  is  not  suitable 
at  all.  A  flannel  shirt  waist  or  blouse,  a 
Windsor  or  string  tie,  a  soft  felt  hat  with  a 
sufficiently  wide  brim,  but  not  too  wide,  com- 
plete your  costume. 

Into  the  knapsack  put  two  coarse  handker- 
chiefs, a  silk  neckerchief  to  tie  around  your 
neck,  the  stockings  and  combination  suit  al- 

4 


CAMPING  CHECK  LISTS 

ready  mentioned,  a  string  of  safety  pins 
clipped  one  into  another,  a  toothbrush,  tubes 
of  cold  cream  and  tooth  paste  (tubes  take 
up  the  least  room  and  are  the  easiest  to 
carry),  a  cotton  shirtwaist,  a  nail  file,  comb, 
small  bottle  of  the  best  cascara  sagrada  tab- 
lets, a  pair  of  cotton  gloves  for  rough  work, 
a  cake  of  castile  soap,  a  towel,  a  stiff  nail 
brush,  and,  if  you  are  wise,  a  book  for 
leisure  hours,  preferably  an  anthology  of 
poems  or  a  collection  of  essays  which  will 
afford  food  for  reflection. 

In  your  preparations  let  it  be  the  rule  to 
strip  away  every  unnecessary  article.  Take 
pride  in  getting  your  kit  down  to  the  abso- 
lute minimum.  Keep  weeding  out  what  you 
don't  need,  and  then  after  that,  weed  out 
again. 

The  same  principle  of  rigid  economy  in 
selection  will  obtain  in  the  check  list  for 
food.  It  is  the  minimum  of  expense  in  the 
woods  that  will  bring  the  maximum  of  com- 

5 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

fort.  In  arranging  for  the  "duffle"  to  be 
taken  with  you  there  is  one  thing  that  can  be 
counted  upon  with  mathematical  certainty: 
hunger.  You  are  going  to  be  hungrier  than 
you  have  been  in  a  long  time.  The  problem 
is,  then,  how  to  tote  enough  food  and  get 
enough  food  to  supply  your  wants.  The 
carriage,  the  keeping,  the  nutritive  value,  all 
these  things  have  to  be  taken  into  considera- 
tion in  wood  life.  At  home  we  have  fresh 
vegetables,  fresh  fruits,  fresh  meats  in 
abundance.  How  can  we  supply  these  things 
for  our  camp  table?  We  can't!  But  desic- 
cated potatoes,  dried  apples,  apricots, 
prunes,  peaches,  white  and  yellow-eye  beans, 
dried  lima  beans,  peas,  whole  or  split,  onions, 
rice,  raisins,  nuts,  white  and  graham  flour, 
corn  meal,  pilot  biscuit,  rolled  oats,  cream  of 
wheat,  cocoa  (leave  coffee  and  tea  at  home), 
sweet  chocolate,  syrup  for  flapjacks,  baking 
soda,  sugar,  salt,  a  few  candles  (helpful  for 
lighting  a  fire  in  wet  weather,  as  well  as  good 

6 


CAMPING  CHECK  LISTS 

for  illumination),  matches,  molasses,  a  little 
olive  oil- -all  these  things,  with  careful  plan- 
ning, we  may  have  in  abundance.  To  these 
items  you  should  add  good  butter — the  best 
salted  butter  is  none  too  good--some  cans  of 
condensed  milk  and  evaporated  milk  and 
cream,  and  a  flitch  of  bacon.  Meat  makes 
a  dirty  camp,  and  a  dirty  camp  means 
skunks  and  hedgehogs  prowling  around.  In 
a  properly  thought-out  dietary  it  will  be  en- 
tirely unnecessary  to  tote  meat.  All  that  is 
needed  for  use  you  can  get  at  the  end  of 
your  fish  rod  or  through  the  barrel  of  your 
shotgun,  and  upon  the  freshness  of  what  you 
catch  or  shoot  you  can  depend.  Dr.  Breck, 
in  his  "Way  of  the  Woods,"  says  that  if  he 
were  obliged  to  choose  between  bacon  and 
dried  apples  and  chocolate,  he  would  always 
take  the  apples  and  chocolate.  Both  portage 
and  health  will  be  served  by  avoiding  the 
carriage  of  a  lot  of  tin  cans.  The  ration  of 
each  article  needed  you  can  work  out  with 

7 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

your  mother  or  housekeeper,  according  to 
the  number  of  people  to  be  in  the  party, 
the  menus  you  plan,  and  the  length  of  your 
stay.  For  a  cooler  for  your  food,  you  will 
find  a  wire  bait  box,  sunk  in  clean  running 
water,  excellent.  The  question  of  grub,  or 
duffle,  as  it  is  called  in  camp  life,  in  proper 
variety,  abundance  and  freshness,  is  the  most 
difficult  question  of  all.  To  this  problem  a 
seasoned  camper  will  give  his  closest  atten- 
tion. 

There  are  other  articles,  plus  the  food 
stuffs,  which  we  must  add  to  our  check  lists 
— chiefly  articles  of  equipment.  Two  or 
three  pails  nesting  into  each  other,  a  tin  re- 
flector baker  for  outdoor  cooking,  enamel- 
ware  plates,  cups  and  bowls,  pans,  dishpans, 
dishmop,  chain  pot-cleaner,  double  boiler, 
broiler,  knives,  forks,  spoons,  pepper  and  salt 
shakers,  flour  sifter,  rotary  can  opener,  long- 
handled  and  short-handled  fry  pans,  a  carv- 
ing knife  and  a  fish  knife.  The  cost  of  these 

8 


CAMPING  CHECK  LISTS 

things  carefully  bought,  will  be  about  six 
dollars.  There  should  also  be  in  your  kit 
some  nails  and  a  hatchet,  toilet  paper, 
woolen  blankets,  mosquito  netting  (tarlatan 
is  better),  twine,  tacks,  oilcloth  for  camp 
table,  and  some  fly  dope. 

With  these  articles,  plus  a  little  knowledge 
of  woodcraft,  there  is  almost  no  wilderness 
into  which  a  capable  girl  cannot  go  and  make 
an  attractive  home.  But  a  little  woodcraft 
we  must  know;  the  rest  we  can  learn  as  we 
go.  There  is  one  fuel  in  the  woods  which 
skillfully  used  will  kindle  any  fire,  even  a 
wet  fire,  and  that  is  birch  bark.  You  can 
always  get  an  inner  layer  of  dry  birch  bark 
from  a  tree.  Keep  a  check  list  of  different 
kinds  of  wood  and  have  it  handy  until  you 
learn  these  woods  for  yourself.  Brush  tops 
or  slashings  will  help  to  start  a  quick  blaze. 
Hickory  is  fine  for  a  quiet  hot  fire.  The 
green  woods  which  burn  readily  are  white 
and  black  birch,  ash,  oak  and  hard  maple. 

9 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

Look  for  pitch,  which  you  are  most  likely 
to  find  in  old  trees,  and  that  will  always  help 
out  and  start  any  fire.  Woods  that  snap, 
such  as  hemlock,  spruce,  cedar  and  larch,  are 
not  to  be  recommended  for  camp  fires,  as  a 
rule.  To  be  careless  or  stupid  about  the 
camp  fire  may  be  to  endanger  the  lives  not 
only  of  thousands  of  wild  creatures  in  the 
wilderness,  but  also  the  lives  of  human  be- 
ings. 

Be  careful  to  have  pure  water  to  drink. 
You  cannot  be  too  careful.  If  you  are  in 
doubt  about  the  water,  don't  drink  it,  or  at 
least  not  until  it  has  been  thoroughly  boiled. 
Take  with  you,  besides  those  I  give,  a  few 
useful  recipes  for  cooking  experiments.  They 
will  bring  pleasure  and  variety  on  dull  days. 
Choose  a  good  place  for  your  cabin  or  shack 
or  tent,  whichever  you  use,  especially  a  place 
where  the  natural  drainage  is  good.  Know 
before  you  set  out  whether  black  flies,  mos- 
quitoes and  midges  have  to  be  encountered 

10 


CAMPING  CHECK  LISTS 

and  go  prepared  to  meet  them.  They  are 
sure  to  meet  you  more  than  halfway.  Don't 
take  any  risks  on  land  or  water.  The  peo- 
ple who  know  the  way  of  the  woods  best  are 
those  who  are  least  foolhardy.  Common 
sense  is  the  law  that  reigns  in  the  wilder- 
ness, and,  in  having  our  good  time,  we  can- 
not do  better  than  to  follow  that  law. 

So  much  for  skeleton  check  lists,  many  of 
which,  in  the  chapters  to  come,  at  the  cost 
of  repetition,  I  shall  amplify.  Among  the 
questions  which  I  shall  take  up  are  the  all- 
important  ones  of  camp  clothes,  camp  food, 
cooking,  the  place,  camp  fires,  furnishing  the 
camp,  the  pocketbook,  the  camp  dog,  the  out- 
door training  school,  the  camp  habit,  wood 
culture,  camp  health,  camp  friendship,  home- 
made camping,  the  canoe,  fishing,  and  the 
trail.  This  great,  big,  beautiful  country  of 
ours  is  full  of  girls,  real  CAMP  FIRE  GIRLS, 
who  love  the  keen  air  of  out  of  doors  and 
the  smell  of  wood  smoke  and  the  freedom  of 

ii 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

hill  and  lake  and  plain,  and  to  them  I  want 
my  little  book  to  come  home  and  to  be  a 
camp  manual  which  will  go  with  them  on  all 
journeys  into  the  wilderness. 


CHAPTER    II 

CAMP   CLOTHES 

IF  you  have  been  camping  once,  there  is 
no  need  for  any  one  to  help  you  de- 
cide  what  wearing  apparel   to   take 
the  next  time.     Through  the  mistakes  made 
and  the  discomforts  involved,  the  girl  will 
have  learned  her  lesson  too  well  to  forget  it. 
But  there  is  always  the  girl  who  has  not  been 
camping.     It  is  chiefly  for  her  benefit  that  I 
am  writing  these  chapters  on  camp  life  for 
girls. 

In  the  first  place,  there  are  two  kinds  of 
camp  clothes  to  be  considered,  for  there  are 
two  kinds  of  camping :  ( i )  the  expedition 
which  permits  taking  a  box  or  trunk  with 
you,  and  (2)  the  rougher  camping  that  al- 
lows only  the  carrying  of  a  duffle  bag  or  a 
knapsack.  If  you  are  limited  to  a  knapsack 

13 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

or  a  duffle  bag,  your  kit  must  be  of  the  most 
concentrated  sort  and  chosen  with  the  great- 
est care.  You  will  find  ten  or  fifteen  pounds 
the  most  you  wish  to  tote  long  distances,  al- 
though at  the  beginning  this  size  of  pack  may 
seem  like  nothing  at  all  to  you.  As  I  have 
found  personally,  even  seven  pounds,  with 
day  after  day  of  tramping,  may  make  an  un- 
accustomed shoulder  ache  under  the  strap. 

If  you  are  to  be  limited  to  a  small  duffle 
bag,  or  a  fairly  capacious  knapsack,  what 
are  the  articles  of  clothing  without  which  no 
girl  can  start?  Let  us  take  up  the  most  im- 
portant item  first,  and  that  is  foot-gear. 
Wear  a  well-made  pair  of  medium  weight 
boots,  thoroughly  tanned,  soaked  with  vis- 
col,  or  rubbed  with  mutton  tallow  both  on 
the  inside  and  the  outside,  to  make  them 
waterproof.  Never  start  out  with  a  new 
pair  of  boots  on  your  feet.  If  necessary,  get 
your  boots  weeks  beforehand,  and  wear  them 
from  time  to  time  till  they  are  thoroughly 


TOBIQUE  MOCCASIN 


MOCCASIN  SHOE 


MOCCASIN       BOOT  HURON  INDIAN  MOCCASINS 


MECCOMOC  OXFORD 


ELKSKIN   MOCCASIN 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

comfortable.  In  addition  to  these  boots 
which  you  wear,  take  a  soft  pair  of  indoor 
moccasins.  These  can  be  worn  when  you 
are  tired  and  loafing  around  camp,  or  while 
the  guide  is  drying  or  greasing  your  boots. 
If  you  have  ever  worn  moccasins  and  are 
going  to  tramp  in  a  moccasin  country,  that  is, 
a  country  of  forest  trails  and  ponds,  then 
buy  a  pair  of  heavy  outdoor  moccasins;  lar- 
rigans  or  ankle-moccasins  are  best.  These 
should  not  be  too  snug.  Worn  over  a  heavy 
cotton  stocking,  or  a  light  woolen  one,  or 
woolen  stockings  drawn  over  cotton,  the 
moccasin  is  the  most  ideal  foot-gear  the  wil- 
derness world  can  ever  know.1  Neat's-foot 
oil  is  also  excellent  for  greasing  moccasins. 
Buy  from  two  to  four  pairs  of  hole-proof 


1  If  you  have  room  take  with  you  an  extra  pair  of 
shoes.  When  you  have  become  a  real  woodswoman  you 
will  never  be  without  woolen  socks  and  moccasins.  The 
thick,  soft  sole  of  sock  and  moccasin  spare  tender  feet 
which  are  not  accustomed  to  hard  tramping  and  rough 
paths. 

16 


CAMP  CLOTHES 

stockings  of  some  reliable  make.  If  these 
stockings  are  first  class  and  can  be  depended 
upon,  two  pairs  will  do.  One  pair  you  will 
wear,  the  other  goes  into  your  knapsack. 
Have  also  several  combination  suits,  some 
for  your  bag  and  one  for  your  back.  These 
suits  should  be  high-necked  and  with  shoul- 
der and  knee  caps;  of  sufficient  warmth  for 
cold  days  and  nights;  in  any  case  porous  and 
of  two  weights. 

If  you  are  going  to  tramp  in  a  skirt,  as 
you  must  if  your  route  touches  upon  civili- 
zation, see  that  it  is  short.  Six  inches  off  the 
ground  is  none  too  much,  and  twelve  is  a 
good  deal  better.  In  an  outing  of  this  sort 
it  is  as  poor  form  to  wear  a  long  skirt  as  it 
would  be  to  wear  a  short  skirt  at  an  after- 
noon tea  in  civilization.  The  skirt  should 
be  of  some  good  quality  khaki,  army  prefer- 
ably, or  a  tweed;  it  should  be  thoroughly 
shrunk,  and  if  it  seems  desirable,  it  should 
be  possible  to  put  this  camp  skirt  in  water 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

and  wash  it.1  Have  ample  pockets  on  either 
side  of  the  front  seams.  If  I  had  to  choose 
between  the  best  of  sweaters  and  a  jacket 
with  a  lot  of  pockets  in  it,  I  should  always 
choose  the  latter,  and  that  is  not  on  account 
of  the  pockets  alone,  but  because  it  is  a  more 
convenient  article  of  clothing.  In  case  of 
cold  weather  it  affords  better  protection,  also 
better  protection  against  rain  as  well  as  cold. 
You  can  have  it  made  with  two  outside 
pockets  and  several  inside — the  more  the 
merrier.  Underneath  the  skirt  wear  a  pair 
of  bloomers.  The  lighter  and  stouter  these 
are,  the  more  of  a  comfort  they  will  be.  I 
have  found  a  good  quality  of  percaline  to  be 
the  best  investment.  Percaline  is  light, 
strong,  slimsy  after  a  little  wearing,  and 
washes  well.  I  have  never  yet  found  a  silk 
that  was  practicable  in  the  woods.  Silk 

*You  can  buy  an  ideal  hunting  suit  at  any  of  the  big 
shops  in  Boston,  New  York  or  Chicago  for  from  $8  to 
$10. 

18 


CAMP  CLOTHES 

« 

bloomers  go  well  with  the  comforts  of  civili- 
zation, but  they  are  not  fit.  to  endure  the  test 
of  roughing  it.  A  flannel  shirtwaist  or 
blouse,  a  Windsor  or  string  tie,  a  soft  felt 
hat — you  may  have  it  as  pretty  as  you  wish, 
provided  it  is  not  too  large  or  over  trimmed 
— complete  the  outfit  which  you  carry  on  you, 
so  to  speak. 

Now  to  return  to  the  outfit  you  carry  in 
your  pack  and  not  on  your  back.  A  pair  of 
indoor  moccasins,  an  extra  pair  of  hole- 
proof  stockings  (these  you  must  have,  not 
only  on  account  of  a  possible  wetting,  but 
also  because  the  stockings  must  be  changed 
every  day,  for  you  cannot  take  too  good 
care  of  your  feet),  two  coarse  handkerchiefs 
of  ample  size,  a  silk  neckerchief  to  tie 
around  your  neck,  an  extra  combination  suit, 
a  few  safety  pins  clipped  one  into  another 
until  you  have  made  a  string  of  them,  a  tooth 
brush,  a  little  tube  of  cold  cream  and  a  tube 
of  tooth  paste  (the  tubes  are  not  breakable 

19 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

and  take  up  the  least  room,  they  are  there- 
fore the  best  to  carry),  a  cotton  or  linen 
shirtwaist  of  some  kind,  a  nail  file,  a  comb, 
a  small  vial  of  cascara  sagrada  tablets,  sev- 
eral rolls  of  film  for  your  camera — the 
camera  itself  can  be  slung  on  a  strap  from 
the  knapsack — a  pair  of  garden  gloves  for 
rough  work  with  sooty  pots  and  kettles,  a 
good-sized  cake  of  the  best  castile  soap,  a 
towel,  a  good  stiff  nail  brush,  and  one  or  two 
books. 

Personally  I  feel  that  the  books  are  as  in- 
dispensable as  anything  in  the  knapsack,  for 
in  moments  of  weariness,  or  when  storm- 
bound, they  prove  the  greatest  comfort  and 
resource.  The  volume  taken  must  not  be  a 
novel  which  read  through  once  one  does  not 
care  to  read  again.  Better  to  take  some 
book  over  which  you  can  or  must  linger.  I 
have  tramped  scores  of  miles  with  the  "Ox- 
ford Book  of  English  Verse"  in  my  knap- 
sack, and  it  has  proved  the  greatest  imag- 

20 


CAMP  CLOTHES 

inable  pleasure  and  solace.  A  small  an- 
thology or  a  book  of  essays,  or  something 
that  you  wish  to  study,  as,  for  example, 
guides  about  the  birds  or  the  trees  or  the 
flowers,  are  good  sorts  of  volumes  to  tote 
with  you — besides,  of  course,  this  camping 
manual. 

Your  kit  for  the  rougher  kind  of  camp- 
ing, provided  you  have  guides  or  men  folks 
who  will  carry  the  food,  or  "grub,"  as  it  is 
called  in  camp  parlance,  and  the  blankets,  is 
now  complete.  But  for  the  one  girl  who 
goes  on  this  rougher  sort  of  camping  expe- 
dition, twenty  go  into  the  woods  to  be  happy 
in  a  quite  civilized  log  cabin  or  shanty. 
These  girls  will  be  taking  a  camp  box  with 
them,  or  a  trunk,  and  can  add  to  their  ward- 
robe. There  is  no  excuse,  however,  for  add- 
ing the  wrong  sort  of  thing.  There  is  no 
excuse  for  wearing  unsuitable,  unattractive 
old  rags  about  camp,  clothes  which  have 
served  their  civilized  purpose  and  have  no 

21 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

fitness  for  the  wilderness  life.  Let  me  give 
you  one  other  word,  from  an  old  timer  at 
camping,  about  what  you  should  wear.. 
Don't  be  foolish  and  put  in  any  finery.  The 
finery  is  as  out  of  place  in  camp  as  your 
camp  boots  would  be  at  a  garden  party  at 
home.  But  several  middy  blouses,  more 
shoes,  more  stockings,  another  skirt,  a  num- 
ber of  towels,  a  few  more  books — all  will 
prove  just  that  much  added  food  for  pleas- 
ure; first,  last,  and  always,  be  comfortable  in 
camp.  There  is  no  reason  for  being  uncom- 
fortable unless  you  enjoy  discomfort.  Any- 
thing, however,  over  and  above  what  you 
actually  need  will  be  only  a  hindrance. 
Those  who  go  camping,  if  they  go  in  the 
right  spirit,  are  looking  for  the  simple  life; 
they  want  to  get  rid  of  paraphernalia,  not  to 
add  to  it.  To  learn  the  happy  art  of  living 
close  to  nature,  means  stripping  away  un- 
necessary things.  There  is  no  place  in  camp 
life  for  fussiness  or  display  of  any  sort.  All 

22 


CAMP  CLOTHES 

that  is  beyond  the  daily  need  is  so  much  lit- 
ter and  clutter,  making  of  camp  life  some- 
thing that  is  a  burden,  something  that  is  un- 
tidy, uncomfortable,  confused.  Of  no  thing 
is  this  more  true  than  of  a  girl's  camp 
clothes. 


CHAPTER    III 

FOOD 


1 


are  several  reasons  why  the 
camp  food  is  almost  more  impor- 
tant than  any  other  consideration. 
To  begin  with,  most  girls  are  leading  a  more 
active  life  than  they  are  accustomed  to  living 
at  home.  This  makes  them  hungry,  and,  add 
to  the  exercise  the  natural  tonic  of  invig- 
orating air,  the  camper  becomes  fairly  rav- 
enous at  meal  time.  There  are  other  rea- 
sons, too,  why  food  is  an  all-important  ques- 
tion. If  one  is  in  the  real  wilderness,  it  will 
be  difficult  to  get.  One  is  obliged,  therefore, 
to  consider  carefully  beforehand  the  kinds 
of  food  necessary  for  a  well-provided  table 
and  a  well-balanced  diet.  Another  reason 
for  taking  thought  about  this  whole  subject 
is  the  portage.  All  the  foods  must  be  toted 

24 


FOOD 

in,  and  not  all  kinds  will  prove  suitable  or 
economical  in  the  long  run  for  this  sort  of 
portage.  Finally,  there  is  the  question  of  the 
ways  and  means  for  keeping  the  food,  after 
it  is  once  safely  in  camp,  in  good  condition. 
As  a  rule,  when  we  go  on  our  expeditions, 
we  leave  regions  where  it  is  easy  to  get  a 
great  variety  of  foods.  The  city  or  its  sub- 
urb or  a  comfortable  country  town,  is  the 
place  we  call  home.  Our  tables  are  filled 
the  year  long  with  fresh  vegetables,  fresh 
fruits,  fresh  meats,  and  all  kinds  of  bread. 
This  dietary  in  all  its  variety,  to  which  we 
have  been  accustomed  at  home,  is  quite  im- 
possible of  realization  in  the  camp.  We 
might  just  as  well  make  up  our  minds  to 
that  at  once.  Yet  accustomed  to  vegetables 
and  fruits  as  we  are,  we  need  them  both  in 
wholesome  quantities.  How  shall  we  get 
them?  Potatoes  of  course,  if  the  camping 
expedition  is  for  any  length  of  time,  that  is 
ten  days  or  more,  must  be  lugged.  And  lug- 

25 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

ging  potatoes  is  heavy  work  over  a  trail.  As 
for  the  other  vegetables  and  fruits,  and  even 
meats,  most  people  buy  large  quantities  of 
tinned  articles  and  so  get  rid  of  the  whole 
question.  Personally  I  think  that  this  is  a 
great  mistake.  It  was  a  delight  to  me  to 
find  in  Doctor  Breck's  "Way  of  the  Woods" 
that  he,  if  obliged  to  choose  between  bacon 
and  dried  apples  and  chocolate,  would  al- 
ways choose  the  chocolate  and  dried  apples. 
And  when  the  question  of  portage  as  well 
as  health  enters  in,  it  may  be  said  right  here 
that  it  is  quite  impossible  to  carry  a  pack 
full  of  tins.  But  aside  from  the  comfort  of 
the  guides,  a  tin-can  camp  is  not  likely  to  be 
a  wholesome  one.  I  am  convinced  that  tin- 
can  camping  is  responsible  for  whatever  ills 
people  experience  when  they  go  into  the 
woods. 

It  is  quite  simple  to  get  different  kinds  of 
dried  vegetables  and  different  kinds  of  dried 
fruits — and  the  best  are  none  too  good — in 

26 


FOOD 

bulk.  At  present  there  are  even  evaporated 
potatoes  on  the  market  for  campers.  Such 
dried  foods  pack  and  carry  best  and  are  most 
wholesome.  Both  white  and  yellow  eye 
beans,  dried  lima  beans,  peas,  whole  and 
split,  onions,  evaporated  apples,  dried 
prunes,  dried  peaches  and  apricots,  rice, 
raisins,  nuts  of  all  kinds,  lemons,  oranges, 
and  even  bananas,  if  they  are  sufficiently 
green,  can  be  quite  easily  taken  into  camp. 
Various  sorts  of  flour  and  meal,  too,  will  be 
needed.  Find  out  how  much  it  takes  to 
bake  the  bread  at  home  and  add  that  to  the 
length  of  your  stay  plus  the  number  of  the 
campers  and  plus  a  little  more  than  you  ac- 
tually need,  and  you  will  be  able  to  work  out 
the  flour  problem  for  yourselves.  There 
should  be  then  white  and  graham  flour,  or 
entire  wheat,  corn  meal,  pilot  bread  (mem- 
ories of  toasted  pilot  bread  in  camp  can 
make  one  smile  from  recollected  joy),  some 
rolled  oats,  cereals  like  cream  of  wheat 

27 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

which    carries    well,    cooks    easily,    and    is 
hearty,  and  various  sorts  of  crackers. 

Now  the  writer  does  not  think  meat  neces- 
sary in  camp.  Except  for  the  fish  caught  and 
the  birds  shot,  none  need  be  eaten.  All  the 
meat  element  or  proteid  necessary  is  pro- 
vided for  in  the  beans,  peas,  and  nuts.  But 
it  is  well  to  take  a  flitch  of  bacon  or  a  few 
jars  of  it  to  use  in  broiling  or  frying  the  fish 
or  game.  Pork  and  lard  are  entirely  un- 
called-for in  a  properly  thought  out  dietary.1 

1 A  brother  camper  says  that  he  thinks  even  the  fish 
would  feel  neglected  without  pork.  On  the  contrary, 
trout  are  very  sensitive  to  good  bacon — in  short,  prefer 
it  to  salt  pork.  If  you  do  not  believe  this  true  fish 
story,  then  catch  two  dozen  half  pound  trout,  slice  your 
bacon  thin  and  draw  off  the  bacon  fat.  Take  out  the 
bacon,  put  the  fat  back  into  the  frying  pan — don't  burn 
yourself — and  pop  in  one-half  dozen  trout.  After  the 
first  mouthful  you  will  find  that  my  contention  that 
trout  are  most  sensitive  to  bacon  entirely  true.  Be  sure 
to  put  a  little  piece  of  bacon  on  that  first  bite.  Fol- 
lowing that,  all  you  have  to  do  is  to  keep  on  biting 
until  your  share  of  the  two  dozen  trout  is  consumed. 
Remarkable  how  those  two  dozen  will  fly — almost  as  if 
the  little  fellows  had  turned  into  birds !  The  reason  I 
am  opposed  to  pork  and  lard  camping  is  that  we  all 

28 


FOOD 

Sufficient  good  fresh  butter  is  very  much 
needed.  If  campers  feel  that  they  must  have 
other  tinned  meats,  the  best  kinds  to  take  are 
the  most  expensive,  ox  tongue,  and  that  sort 
of  thing.  Several  months  ago  four  of  us 
started  off  on  a  ten  days'  camping  expedition 
into  a  very  northern  wilderness  unknown  to 
us.  One  of  the  party,  needlessly  ambitious, 
took  a  preserved  chicken  in  a  glass  jar 
bought  from  the  finest  provision  house  in 
Boston.  By  the  time  we  reached  our  des- 
tination, the  chicken  was  anything  but  pre- 
served. Indeed,  unless  all  signs  failed,  it  had 
already  embarked  upon  a  new  incarnation. 
No  arm  in  the  party  was  long  enough  to 
carry  it  out  and  set  it  on  a  distant  rock  for 
the  skunks  to  visit.  Nor  shall  I  soon  forget 

know  nowadays  how  diseased  such  meat  may  be.  To 
go  into  the  woods  for  health  and  run  any  avoidable 
risks  is  folly.  Get  a  flitch  of  the  best  bacon  and  the 
best  bacon  is  Ferris  bacon.  From  this  you  will  get 
enough  fat  for  all  frying  purposes;  also,  in  case  you 
use  fat  as  a  substitute  for  butter,  there  will  be  enough 
bacon  fat  for  cakes,  etc. 

29 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

a  certain  meat  ragout  which  we  concocted  in 
a  Canadian  wilderness.  We  had  the  ragout, 
but  alas,  we  had  a  good  deal  else,  too,  in- 
cluding a  doctor  who  had  to  cover  half  a 
county  to  reach  us !  Aside  from  the  fact 
that  people  who  live  in  cities  and  towns  eat 
altogether  too  much  meat,  in  camp  there  is 
not  only  the  question  of  its  uselessness,  but 
also  the  fact  that  there  are  no  ways  to  care 
for  it  properly.  Meat  makes  a  dirty  camp.1 

1 1  cannot  emphasize  too  often  the  absolute  importance 
of  keeping  a  clean  camp.  Mr.  Rutger  Jewett,  to  whom 
this  camping  manual  and  its  author  are  indebted  for 
many  wise  suggestions,  thinks  that  it  is  not  always 
feasible  to  burn  up  everything.  "Every  camp,"  he 
writes,  "has  some  empty  tin  cans.  It  seems  to  me  that 
the  best  plan  in  this  case  is  to  have  a  small  trench  dug, 
far  enough  from  the  camp  to  avoid  all  disagreeable  re- 
sults and  yet  not  so  far  away  that  it  is  inaccessible. 
Here  cans  and  unburnable  refuse  from  the  kitchen  can 
be  thrown  and  kept  covered  with  earth  or  sand  to  avoid 
flies  and  odors.  Everything  that  can  be  burned,  should 
be."  The  only  difficulty  in  my  mind  is,  in  case  the 
region  is  hedgehog-infested,  that  those  charming  crea- 
tures will  form  their  usual  "bread-line"-— this  time  to  the 
trench — and  add  digging  to  their  accomplishments  in 
gnawing.  However!  Better  rinse  out  your  tin  cans; 
Sis  Hedgehog  is  less  likely  to  mistake  the  can  for  the 
original  delicacy. 

30 


FOOD 

All  food  refuse  should  be  burned  up,  any- 
way, never  thrown  out  into  the  brush,  and  it 
is  difficult  to  burn  meat  bones.  The  girl  or 
woman  who  keeps  a  dirty  camp  is  beneath 
contempt.  There  is  likely  to  be  one  neigh- 
bor, if  not  more,  in  the  vicinity  of  every 
camp,  who  will  make  things  uncomfortable 
for  the  campers.  He  should  be  called  the 
camp  pig,  and  he  is  the  hedgehog.  Also  his 
cousin,  the  skunk,  will  hang  around  to  see 
what  is  carelessly  thrown  out  or  left  for  him 
to  eat.  The  hedgehog  is  the  greediest,  most 
unwelcome  fellow  in  the  woods,  and  even  the 
fact  that  the  poet  Robert  Browning  had  one 
as  a  pet  will  not  redeem  him  in  the  eyes  of 
the  practical  camper.  He  hangs  around  any 
camp  that  is  not  kept  clean,  gnaws  axe 
handles  which  the  salty  human  hand  has 
touched,  licks  out  tin  cans  which  have  not 
been  rinsed  as  they  should  be  before  they 
are  thrown  away- -in  short,  he  follows  up 
every  bit  of  camp  slackness.  There  is  only 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

one  way  to  keep  off  hedgehogs  and  that  is 
to  have  an  absolutely  tidy  camp. 

In  addition  to  the  food  stuffs  already  men- 
tioned, there  are  several  others  which  should 
be  taken  in  the  necessary  quantities.  Salt 
and  pepper — better  leave  tea  and  coffee  at 
home  and  take  cocoa — soda,  sugar,  a  few 
candles  (helpful  in  lighting  a  fire  in  wet 
weather,  as  well  as  for  illumination), 
matches,  in  a  rubber  box  if  possible,  kero- 
sene if  your  camp  outfit  will  permit  such  a 
luxury,  olive  oil,  maple  syrup  for  flapjacks, 
molasses,  condensed  and  evaporated  milk  or 
milk  powder. 

The  articles  which  need  to  be  cooled  can 
be  kept  fresh  in  a  nearby  brook.  Dead  fish, 
however,  should  never  be  allowed  to  lie  in 
water,  but  should  be  wrapped  up  in  ferns  or 
large  leaves.  If  you  are  camping  for  any 
length  of  time,  by  making  a  little  runway  out 
of  a  trough  you  can  have  freshly  flowing 
water,  cooling  butter  and  other  food  stuffs, 

32 


REFLECTOR  BAKER. 


HOLD-ALL. 


PATENTED  FRY  PAN. 


HUNTING    KNIFE. 


BIRCH    BARK    CUP. 

33 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

all  the  time.  Or  a  receptacle  constructed 
something  like  a  wire  bait  box  will  prove  as 
good  as  the  flowing  water.  This  sunk  into 
a  cool  pond  or  lake,  makes  an  admirable  ice 
chest,  into  which  the  finny  creatures  cannot 
get.  In  some  rotation  which  you  have  de- 
cided upon,  the  care  of  the  food  should  re- 
ceive the  especial  attention  from  one  girl 
every  day.  In  this  way  hedgehogs,  skunks, 
mice,  rats,  ants,  will  all  be  kept  at  a  distance. 
There  are  in  addition  to  these  various  food 
stuffs  and  their  care,  as  I  said  in  the 
first  chapter,  many  articles  necessary  for 
camp  life  about  which  we  must  think. 
If  you  are  going  off  for  a  few  days  with  a 
guide,  he  will  attend  to  these  things  for  you. 
But  if  you  are  setting  up  a  camp  for  your- 
self, you  will  need  to  have  them  in  mind. 
They  are,  two  or  three  tin  pails  of  con- 
venient sizes  nesting  or  fitting  into  one  an- 
other so  that  they  can  be  easily  carried,  a 
tin  reflector  baker  for  outdoor  cooking,  a 

34 


FOOD 

coffee  pot  if  you  are  foolish  enough  to  take 
coffee,  enameled  ware  plates  and  cups,  basins, 
pans,  dishpans,  a  dishmop,  a  chain  pot- 
cleaner,  a  double  boiler,  a  broiler,  knives 
and  forks,  spoons  big  and  little,  pepper  and 
salt  shakers,  flour  sifter,  a  rotary  can  opener, 
a  frypan,  long-handled  and  short-handled,  a 
carving  knife  and  a  fish  knife  if  you  intend 
to  do  a  great  deal  of  fishing.  There  are 
many  kinds  of  cooking  kits.  There  is 
a  good  one  for  four  persons  which  may  be 
obtained  at  about  six  dollars  from  any  large 
hardware  dealer.  Add  to  these  things 
which  have  been  mentioned  fish  hooks,  a  lan- 
tern, lantern  wicks,  nails  of  different  sizes,  a 
hammer — don't  forget  the  hammer! — toilet 
paper,  woolen  blankets,  mosquito  netting  (if 
it  is  a  mosquito-infested  district),  fly  dope  to 
rub  on  hands  and  face,  oilcloth  for  camp 
table,  some  twine  and  some  tacks. 

Equipped  with  these  articles  and  what  you 
carry  in  your  knapsacks  and  what  you  wear, 

35 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

there  is  almost  no  wilderness  in  which  a  girl 
cannot  have  a  good  time,  improve  her  health, 
and  be  the  wiser  for  having  entered  the  wil- 
derness. 


CHAPTER    IV 

COOK   AND    COOKEE 

ANY  of  you  who  have  ever  seen  a 
lumber  camp  will  remember  some- 
thing of  how  it  is  constructed. 
Separate  from  the  main  building  is  the  su- 
perintendent's office,  a  little  cabin  built  usu- 
ally of  tar  paper  and  light  timber;  then  there 
is  the  hovel,  as  it  is  called,  in  which  the 
horses  and  cows  are  stabled,  and  finally  there 
is  the  big  main  building  where  the  crew  sleep 
and  eat.  But  separated  from  the  men's  dor- 
mitory by  a  passageway  tha-t  leads  into  the 
outdoors,  is  the  big  room  used  as  kitchen  and 
dining  room.  Just  beyond  this  and  opening 
into  the  kitchen,  is  the  room  in  which  the 
cook  and  his  assistant  sleep. 

In  these  two  rooms  in  the  wilderness,  cook 
and  cookee  reign  supreme.  They  are  the 
most  important  persons  in  the  camp.  They 

37 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

are  the  best  paid.  Their  word  is  law.  They 
have  a  room  by  themselves,  partly  for  clean- 
liness' sake,  and  also  because  the  success  of 
the  whole  camp  depends  more  or  less  upon 
them.  But  it  is  not  alone  the  lumber  cook 
and  cookee  who  make  or  mar  the  success  of 
camp  life.  It  is  also  the  cook  in  the  hotel 
camp,  and  even  more,  the  cook  in  the  hun- 
dreds of  thousands  of  home  camps  which 
make  glad  our  holiday  season.  The  king 
pin  of  life,  physically — and  I  might  say  mor- 
ally, too,  for  wherever  the  health  is  excel- 
lent the  morals  are  likely  to  be  so — is  good, 
pure,  abundant  food,  properly  cooked. 

Nowhere  is  the  art  of  cooking  put  so  to 
the  test  as  in  camp.  You  have  less  to  do 
with;  you  have  bigger  appetites  to  do  for 
and  more  need  physically  for  the  food  you 
eat.  There  is  one  article  which,  if  you  are 
planning  to  do  more  cooking  out  of  doors 
than  can  be  done  in  a  pot  of  water  over  a 
fire  and  a  frying  pan,  you  must  have,  and 

38 


COOK  AND  COOKEE 

that  is  a  tin  reflector  baker.  One  year  I 
was  caught  in  the  steadiest  downpour  which 
I  have  ever  known  while  camping.  We  wrere 
on  the  West  Branch  of  the  Penobscot,  in  an 
isolated  region  at  the  foot  of  Mount  Katah- 
din,  the  highest  mountain  in  the  state  of 
Maine.  We  had  nothing  to  sleep  under  ex- 
cept a  tent  fly,  and  the  rain  drove  in  night 
and  day,  keeping  us  thoroughly  wet.  Our 
Indian  guides  managed  to  make  the  fire  go 
in  front  of  the  leaky  tar  paper  shack  which 
we  used  as  a  kitchen.  There  was  nothing 
we  could  do  profitably  but  cook,  so  I  amused 
myself  cooking.  I  managed  to  bake,  in  the 
rain,  before  an  open  fire,  within  that  little 
tin  reflector  baker,  some  tarts  which  were 
very  successful.  Many  other  articles,  too, 
were  cooked  and  came  out  thoroughly  edi- 
ble. That  was  indeed  a  test  of  the  little 
tin  baker  which  I  shall  never  forget. 

There  is  one  sort  of  kindling  fuel  unfail- 
ingly useful  in  the  woods.     Even  the  rain 

39 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

s 

cannot  dampen  its  blaze.  The  fuel  to  which 
I  refer  is  birch-bark.  It  will  light  when 
nothing  else  will  light,  I  suppose  because  of 
the  large  amount  of  oil  in  it.  Even  when 
you  take  it  wet  from  the  ground,  instead  of 
stripping  it  from  a  tree — and  you  can  al- 
ways get  an  inner  layer  of  dry  birch-bark 
from  a  tree — it  will  burn  and  kindle  a  good 
fire.  A  box  of  matches  is  a  natural  posses- 
sion for  a  boy,  but  I  am  not  so  sure  that 
this  is  true  with  a  girl.  Every  camper 
should  have  a  hard  rubber  box  of  matches 
in  his  possession,  should  know  where  it  is — 
always  in  an  inside  pocket  if  possible — and 
should  take  good  care  of  it.  But  to  go  back 
to  that  wet  day  and  the  shining  little  tin 
baker  on  the  West  Branch  at  the  foot  of 
Katahdin.  There  are  some  woods  which 
are  good  for  rapid,  quiet  burning  and  some 
that  are  poor,  as  every  experienced  woods- 
man will  tell  you.  You  must  keep,  until  you 
know  it  by  heart,  a  check  list  of  different 

40 


COOK  AND  COOKEE 

kinds  of  wood,  just  as  you  must  keep  a  food 
check  list  and  other  check  lists.  If  it  is  a  big 
camp  fire,  which  for  jollity's  sake  or  the  sake 
of  warmth  you  wish  to  start,  and  do  not  care 
to  keep  going  for  a  long  time,  almost  any 
sort  of  wood  will  serve.  Brush  tops  or 
slashings  will  do  quite  well  to  start  such  a 
blaze.  Hickory  is  the  best  wood  for  use 
when  you  want  a  deep,  quiet  hot  fire  for 
cooking.  There  is  scarcely  any  better  wood 
for  the  camp  cook  to  use  than  apple,  but  that 
most  campers  are  not  likely  to  be  able  to 
get.  The  green  woods  which  burn  most 
readily  and  are  best  to  start  a  quick  fire  with 
are  birch,  white  and  black,  hard  maple,  ash, 
oak,  and  hickory.  The  older  the  tree  the 
more  pitch  there  will  be  in  it,  and  the  pitch 
is  an  effective  and  noisy  kindler  of  fires. 
Hemlock,  spruce,  cedar,  and  the  larch,  all 
snap  badly.  I  have  been  obliged  to  use  a 
good  deal  of  cedar  in  an  open  Franklin  in 
my  camp  study  this  last  summer.  It  has 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

never  been  safe  to  leave  one  of  these  cedar 
fires  without  shutting  the  doors  of  the  Frank- 
lin stove.  I  have  known  the  burning  cedar 
to  hurl  sparks  the  entire  length  of  the  cabin. 
As  the  chinking  is  excelsior,  you  can  im- 
agine what  one  of  those  cedar  sparks  would 
do  if  it  snapped  onto  a  bit  of  the  excelsior. 
Cabins  not  chinked  with  excelsior  are  usu- 
ally chinked  with  moss,  which  is  almost  as 
inflammable.  With  woods  that  snap,  the 
camper  can  never  be  too  careful,  and  no  fire 
made  of  snappy  wood  should  ever  be  built 
near  a  cabin  or  a  tent.  One  spark,  and  it 
might  be  too  late  to  check  the  quickly  spread- 
ing fire. 

There  is  another  thing  about  which  the 
camp  cook  and  all  girls  camping  need  to  be 
very  careful,  and  that  is  the  drinking  water. 
One  cannot  be  too  exacting  in  this  matter,  too 
scrupulous,  too  clean.  Provided  there  is 
spring  or  lake  water  about  whose  purity 
there  can  be  no  doubt,  the  question  is  settled. 

42 


COOK  AND  COOKEE 

In  this  connection  it  may  be  said  of  drink- 
ing: when  in  doubt,  don't.  A  quarter  of  a 
mile,  a  half  a  mile,  a  mile,  is  none  too  far 
to  go  to  get  the  right  sort  of  water.  This 
can  be  done  in  squads,  one  set  of  girls  going 
one  day  and  another  the  next.  This  water 
must  be  used  for  the  cooking,  too.  If  there 
is  any  doubt  about  the  water  supply,  it  should 
be  filtered  or  boiled  or  both.  Go  into  camp 
ready  to  make  pure  water  one  of  your  chief 
considerations,  and  never,  under  any  circum- 
stances, drink  water  or  eat  anything,  even 
fish,  which  may  have  been  contaminated  by 
sewage.  How  vigilant  one  has  to  be  about 
this  an  experience  of  my  own,  some  months 
ago,  will  show  you.  The  pond  to  which  we 
were  going  was  indeed  in  the  wilderness,  in- 
accessible except  by  canoe.  I  had  walked 
one  long  "carry,"  paddled  across  a  good- 
sized  pond — two  miles  wide,  I  think — and 
had  been  poling  up  some  quick-water.  The 
"rips"  were  low,  and  scratching  would  bet- 

43 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

ter  describe  the  efforts  to  which  we  were  put 
than  poling  does.  My  hands  became  so  dry 
from  the  incessant  work  with  the  pole  that 
I  had  to  wet  them  to  get  any  purchase  on  it 
at  all.  A  greased  pig  could  not  have  been 
harder  to  hold  than  that  pole.  When  finally 
we  reached  the  little  mountain-surrounded 
pond  for  which  we  were  making  up  the 
quickwater,  I  was  hot,  breathless,  exhausted. 
I  could  think  of  only  one  thing,  and  that  was 
a  drink  of  water.  There  were  a  few  camps 
about  the  lake,  but  it  did  not  enter  my  mind 
that  they  would  empty  their  sewage  into  it 
and  take  their  fish  and  their  water  out  of  it. 
Yet  after  I  had  drunk,  the  first  thing  I  no- 
ticed, in  passing  one  camp,  was  that  they  un- 
mistakably did  empty  their  sewage  into  the 
pond.  No  evidence  was  lacking  that  it  all 
went  into  the  water  not  far  from  where  I 
had  taken  a  drink.  It  is  not  a  pleasant  sub- 
ject, but  it  is  one  about  which  it  is  necessary 
to  speak. 

44 


COOK  AND  COOKEE 

It  is  well  to  take  in  your  kit  some  place, 
unless  you  are  an  accomplished  cook  and 
have  it  all  in  your  head,  a  small,  good  cook 
book.  The  first  thing  which  you  should  re- 
collect about  the  rougher  sort  of  camping  is 
that  you  will  have  no  fresh  eggs  or  milk  with 
which  to  do  your  cooking.  You  should  have 
recipes  for  making  your  biscuits,  johnnycake, 
bread,  corn-pone,  cakes,  flapjacks,  cookies, 
potato  soup,  bean  soup,  pea  soup,  chowder, 
rice  pudding,  and  for  cooking  game  and 
fish.  In  that  veteran  book  for  campers, 
'The  Way  of  the  Woods,"  some  good 
recipes  for  the  necessary  dishes  are  given. 
Whatever  dishes  you  plan  to  make  in  the 
wilderness  should  be  simple  and  few.  Any- 
thing beyond  the  simplest  dietary  is  not  in 
the  spirit  of  camp  life,  and  will  only  detract 
from  rather  than  add  to  the  general 
pleasure.  Those  recipes  which  seem  to  me 
absolutely  necessary  I  will  give  to  you  in  the 
next  chapter. 


CHAPTER    V 

LOG-CABIN   COOKERY 

DID  you  ever  get  to  a  camp  fire  or 
log-cabin  stove  at  eleven  o'clock 
and  know  that  there  must  be  a 
hearty  meal  by  twelve?  I  have  lots  of 
times.  The  only  way  to  do,  if  one  must 
meet  these  emergencies  on  short  notice,  is  to 
have  what  I  call  "stock"  on  hand.  In  using 
this  word  I  do  not  mean  soup  stock,  either. 
What  I  mean  is  that  there  must  be  some 
vegetables  or  cereals  or  other  articles  of  food 
at  least  partially  prepared  for  eating. 

I  remember  one  summer  when  I  was  very 
busy  with  my  writing.  I  was  chief  cook  and 
bottle  washer,  besides  being  my  own  secre- 
tary, and  I  had  three  members  in  my  family 
to  look  out  for — a  friend  with  a  hearty  ap- 
petite, a  big  dog  with  a  no  less  hearty  appe- 
tite and  a  rather  greedy  little  Maine  cat. 


LOG-CABIN    COOKERY 

The  question  was  how  to  carry  on  the  work 
which  was  properly  my  own  and  at  the  same 
time  attend  to  cooking  and  other  household 
work.  I  hit  upon  a  plan  which  served  excel- 
lently with  me.  I  do  not  recommend  it  to 
any  one  else,  especially  to  girls  who  will  be 
going  into  the  woods  for  a  vacation  and  will 
have  no  duties  except  those  connected  with 
their  camp  life.  But  this  plan  of  mine  dem- 
onstrated to  me  once  and  for  all  that,  even 
if  one  is  very  busy,  it  is  possible  to  have  a 
bountifully  supplied  table. 

The  first  day  I  tried  the  experiment  I 
went  .  into  the  kitchen  at  eleven  o'clock. 
Never  had  I  been  more  tired  of  the  everlast- 
ing question  of  what  to  have  to  eat.  It 
seemed  to  me  that  there  was  never  any  other 
question  except  that  one,  and  I  determined, 
with  considerable  savage  feeling,  to  escape 
from  it.  At  eleven  o'clock  I  chopped  my 
own  kindling,  started  my  own  fire,  and  be- 
gan twirling  the  saucepans,  frying  pans  and 

.47 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

baking  tins  which  I  wanted  to  use.  I  was 
set  upon  cooking  up  enough  food  to  last  for 
three  or  four  days,  and  I  did.  At  two 
o'clock  not  only  was  all  the  food  cooked  and 
set  away  for  future  consumption,  but  also 
we  had  eaten  our  dinner.  In  that  time  what 
had  I  prepared?  There  was  a  big  double 
boiler  full  of  corn  meal.  After  this  had  been 
thoroughly  boiled  in  five  times  its  bulk  of 
water  and  a  large  tablespoonful  of  salt,  I 
poured  it  out  into  baking  tins  and  set  it 
away  to  cool.  Various  things  can  be  done 
with  this  stock;  among  others,  once  cool,  it 
slices  beautifully,  and  is  delicious  fried  in 
butter  or  in  bacon  fat,  and  satisfying  to  the 
hungriest  camper.  Also  a  large  panful  of 
rice  had  been  cooked.  This  had  been  set 
aside  to  be  used  in  croquettes,  in  rice  pud- 
dings and  to  be  served  plain  with  milk  at 
supper  time.  So  much  for  the  rice  and  the 
corn  meal.  I  had  broken  up  in  two-inch 
pieces  a  large  panful  of  macaroni.  This  was 


LOG-CABIN    COOKERY 

boiled  in  salt  water,  part  of  it  cooled  and  set 
away  for  further  use,  some  of  it  mixed  with 
a  canful  of  tomato  and  stewed  for  our  din- 
ner and  the  rest  baked  with  tomato  and 
bread  crumbs,  to  be  heated  up  for  another 
day.  On  top  of  the  stove,  too,  I  had  a  mam- 
moth vegetable  stew.  In  this  stew  were  po- 
tatoes, carrots,  parsnips,  cabbage,  beets, 
turnips,  plenty  of  butter  and  plenty  of  salt. 
The  stew  remained  on  the  stove,  carefully 
covered,  during  the  time  that  the  fire  was 
lighted  and  was  put  on  again  the  next  day 
to  complete  the  cooking,  for  it  takes  long 
boiling  to  make  a  really  good  stew.  Inside 
the  oven  were  two  big  platefuls  of  apples 
baking.  These  had  been  properly  cored  and 
the  centers  filled  with  butter  and  sugar  and 
cinnamon;  also  two  or  three  dozen  potatoes 
were  baking  in  the  oven,  some  of  which 
would  serve  for  quick  frying  on  another  day. 
In  addition  to  the  food  mentioned,  I  set  a 
large  two-quart  bowl  full  of  lemon  jelly  with 

49 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

vegetable  gelatin.  It  took  me  exactly  fifteen 
minutes  to  make  this  jelly  and  during  that 
time  I  was  giving  my  attention  to  other 
things  besides.  I  made  also  a  panful  of 
baking  powder  biscuits  which,  considering 
the  way  they  were  hustled  about,  behaved 
themselves  in  a  most  long-suffering  and  com- 
mendable fashion,  turning  out  to  be  good 
biscuits  after  all. 

Now,  the  import  of  all  this  is  that,  with 
planning,  a  little  practice  and  some  hopping 
about,  a  good  deal  of  cooking  and  prepara- 
tion of  food  can  be  done  in  a  short  time. 
Unnecessary  "fussing"  about  the  cooking  is 
not  desirable  in  camp  life.  The  simpler  that 
life  can  be  made  and  kept  the  better.  The 
more  we  can  get  away  from  unwholesome 
condiments,  highly  seasoned  foods,  too  much 
meat  eating  and  coffee  drinking,  too  many 
sweets  and  pastries,  the  better.  The  girl 
who  goes  into  the  woods  with  the  idea  of 
having  all  the  luxuries — many  of  them 

50 


LOG-CABIN    COOKERY 

wholly  unnecessary  and  some  of  them  unde- 
sirable--of  her  home  life,  is  no  true  "sport." 
The  grand  object  for  which  we  cook  in  camp 
is  a  good  appetite  and  that  needs  no  sauce 
and  sweets. 

What  are  some  of  the  recipes  a  girl  should 
have  with  her  for  log-cabin  cooking?  In 
the  first  place,  we  must  take  with  us  a  good 
recipe  for  bread-making.  There  are  so  many 
I  will  give  none.  The  best  one  to  have  is 
the  one  used  at  home,  but  let  me  say  here 
that  no  flour  so  answers  all  dietetic  needs  in 
the  woods  as  entire  wheat.  Delicious  bak- 
ing powder  biscuits  can  be  made  from  it  as 
well  as  bread.  Also  know  how  to  boil  a  'po- 
tato. You  think  this  is  a  matter  of  no  im- 
portance? It  would  surprise  you  then, 
wouldn't  it,  to  know  that  there  are  some  peo- 
ple devoting  all  of  their  time  teaching  the 
ignorant  and  the  poor  the  art  of  boiling  a 
potato.  You  can  boil  all  the  good  out  of  it 
and  make  it  almost  worthless  as  food,  as 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

well  as  untempting,  or  you  can  cook  it  prop- 
erly, making  it  everything  it  ought  to  be. 
Know,  too,  how  to  clean  a  fish.  Oh,  dear, 
you  never  could  do  that!  It  makes  you 
shiver  to  think  of  such  a  thing.  Very  well 
then,  camp  is  no  place  for  you.  Your 
squeamishness  which  might  seem  attractive 
some  place  else  will  only  be  silly  there, 
making  you  a  dead  weight  about  somebody 
else's  neck.  Does  your  brother  Boy  Scout 
know  how  to  clean  a  fish?  Did  you  ever 
know  a  real  boy  who  did  not  know  how  to 
clean  a  fish?  Why  not  a  real  girl,  then,  per- 
haps a  Camp  Fire  Girl?  Oh,  but  the  cook 
— no,  you  will  be  the  cook  in  camp  or  the 
assistant  cook.  Then  get  your  brother  to 
show  you  how  to  cut  off  its  head  and  to 
scale  it,  if  it  is  a  scaly  fish,  how  to  slit  it 
open,  taking  out  the  entrails,  how  to  wash 
it  thoroughly  and  dry  it,  how  to  dip  it  in 
flour  or  meal  and  to  drop  it  into  the  sizzling 
frying  pan,  how  to  turn  it  and  then  finally 

52 


LOG-CABIN    COOKERY 

the  moment  when,  crisp  and  brown,  it  should 
be  taken  out  and  served.  Know,  too,  how  to 
pluck  and  clean  a  partridge.1  One  day  this 
last  summer  I  went  up  the  cut  behind  my 
camp,  intent  upon  finding  a  partridge  for 
our  supper.  I  hadn't  gone  far  before  I 
found  one  and  with  the  second  shot  of  my 
rifle  brought  the  poor  fellow  down.  I  took 
him  home  to  the  cook  whom  I  had  with  me 
then,  the  daughter  of  a  neighboring  farmer. 
I  gave  her  the  bird  and  told  her  to  get  him 
ready  for  supper.  She  said  she  couldn't; 
she  didn't  know  how. 

"Don't  know  how?"  I  asked.  "What  do 
you  mean?" 

She  said  that  she  did  not  know  how  to 
pluck  and  clean  a  partridge. 

1  If  your  mother  and  brother  have  not  taught  you 
how  to  clean  fish  and  pluck  partridge,  then  it  would  be 
best  to  go  to  the  butcher  and  fishman  and  take  lessons 
of  them.  If  it  is  possible  to  go  on  your  first  expedi- 
tion with  a  good  guide,  that  will  settle  the  whole  diffi- 
culty, for  your  guide  will  know  the  best  way  and  be 
glad  to  teach  you. 

53 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

"Well,"  I  replied,  "you  know  how  to 
clean  a  chicken,  don't  you?" 

"Mercy  me,  no!"  she  objected,  looking 
pale  and  silly.  "Mother  always  cleans  the 
chickens." 

Mother  always  cleans  the  chickens ! 
Mother  does  a  good  deal  too  much  of  the 
things  that  are  somewhat  unpleasant  in  this 
American  home  life  of  ours.  This  girl  had 
been  perfectly  willing  that  her  mother 
should  do  all  the  work  which  seemed  to  her 
too  disagreeable  or  unpleasant  to  do  herself. 
But  I  am  glad  to  say,  and  her  mother  ought 
to  have  been  grateful  to  me,  she  helped  in 
dressing  that  partridge  and  I  did  not  care  a 
tinker  when,  after  it  had  been  cooked,  she 
seemed  to  feel  too  badly  to  eat  very  much  of 
it.  I  wonder  how  her  mother  had  felt  after 
all  the  hundreds  of  chickens  she  had  killed, 
plucked,  cleaned  and  cooked  for  that  very 
girl  of  hers. 

You  must  know,  too,  how  to  boil  an  egg, 

54 


LOG-CABIN    COOKERY 

and  do  not  do  as  I  saw  that  same  incompe- 
tent farmer's  daughter  do — I  suppose  be- 
cause she  had  left  almost  everything  to  her 
very  competent  mother — do  not  boil  your 
eggs  in  the  tea  kettle.  The  water  in  the 
tea  kettle  should  be  kept  as  clean  and  fresh 
as  possible.  There  is  no  excuse  for  a  dirty 
tea  kettle.  We  should  be  able  in  the  woods, 
too,  to  know  how  to  scramble  eggs,  if  one 
has  them,  and  to  make  omelets,  and  to  boil 
corn  meal,  and  the  best  ways  for  cooking 
rice  and  of  baking  fruits.  Good  apple  pies, 
too,  if  you  can  make  pastry  without  too 
much  trouble,  will  not  go  amiss. 

There  are  a  few  recipes  which  you  must 
get  out  of  the  home  cook  book,  besides  the 
few  which  I  will  now  give  you.  Baking  pow- 
der biscuits  are  not  easy  to  make.  Even 
very  good  cooks  sometimes  do  not  have  suc- 
cess with  them.  Do  not  be  discouraged  if  at 
your  first  effort  you  should  fail.  Keep  on 
trying.  You  must  learn,  for  I  think  it  can 

55 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

be  said  that  baking  powder  biscuits  consti- 
tute the  bread  of  the  woods.  I  know  farm- 
ing families  in  northern  Maine  who  do  not 
know  what  it  is  to  make  raised  bread.  They 
have  nothing  but  baking  powder  or  soda  and 
cream  of  tartar  bread.  Use  one  quart  of 
sifted  flour,  one  teaspoonful  of  salt,  three 
rounding  teaspoonfuls  of  baking  powder, 
one  large  tablespoonful  of  butter  and  enough 
milk,  evaporated  or  powdered  milk,  or  fresh 
if  you  have  it,  to  make  a  soft  dough.  Mix 
these  things  in  the  order  in  which  they  are 
given,  and  when  the  dough  is  stiff  enough  to 
be  cut  with  the  top  of  a  baking  powder  can 
or  a  biscuit  cutter,  sprinkle  your  bread  and 
also  your  rolling  pin  with  flour  and  roll  out 
the  dough.  It  will  depend  upon  your  oven 
somewhat,  but  probably  it  will  take  you  from 
ten  to  fifteen  minutes  to  bake  these  biscuits. 
A  recipe  for  corn  meal  cake,  too,  should 
be  in  one's  camp  kit.  The  simpler  that  re- 
cipe the  better.  Some  forms  of  corn  bread 

56 


LOG-CABIN    COOKERY 

take  so  long  to  prepare  that  they  are  not 
suitable  for  the  woods.  The  one  I  shall  give 
you  will  prove  practicable.  You  might  take 
one  from  your  own  home  cook  book,  too,  if 
you  wish.  Mix  the  ingredients  in  the  order 
in  which  they  are  set  down  and  bake  them  in 
a  moderately  hot  oven.  If  you  haven't  any- 
thing else  to  use,  bread  tins  a  third  full  will 
serve.  One  cup  of  whole  corn  meal,  a  half 
a  teaspoonful  of  salt  and  a  cup  of  sugar,  a 
whole  cup  of  flour,  three  teaspoonfuls  of 
baking  powder — these  should  be  level — one 
egg,  one  cup  of  milk  and  a  tablespoonful  of 
melted  butter. 

Pancakes  you  must  also  know  how  to 
make.  One  can't  very  well  get  along  in  the 
wilderness  without  some  sort  of  griddle 
cake,  the  simpler  the  better.  Sour  milk  pan- 
cakes are  the  best,  particularly  as  it  is  not 
necessary  to  use  eggs  if  one  has  sour  milk, 
but  that  is  not  always  feasible,  as  frequently 
you  will  have  to  use  evaporated  milk.  Mix 

57 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

a  pint  of  flour,  a  half  a  teaspoonful  of  salt, 
a  teaspoonful  of  soda,  one  pint  of  sour 
milk,  and  two  eggs  thoroughly  beaten.  See 
that  your  frying  pan,  for  in  camp  you  will 
cook  your  cakes  in  the  frying  pan,  has  been 
on  the  stove  some  time.  Grease  it  thor- 
oughly with  bacon  fat  or  butter;  never  use 
lard  unless  you  have  to.  Cook  the  cakes 
thoroughly.  You  will  find  turning  your  first 
hot  cakes  something  of  an  adventure. 

There  should  also  be  among  our  log-cabin 
recipes  some  directions  for  telling  you  how 
to  make  at  least  two  kinds  of  nourishing 
soup  without  stock.  Soup  with  stock  in  camp 
life  is  not  practicable.  Pea  or  bean  soups 
are  the  most  satisfying  and  satisfactory. 
The  peas  or  beans  must  be  soaked  in  cold 
water  over  night.  Pea  or  bean  soups  take  a 
long  time  to  make,  so  that  it  is  not  always 
practicable  to  have  them  in  camp.  I  will 
give  you  a  recipe  for  split  pea  soup.  Take 
with  you,  if  you  are  likely  to  need  it,  also,  a 

58 


LOG-CABIN    COOKERY 

recipe  for  black  bean  soup.  After  soak- 
ing over  night,  pour  the  water  off  the  split 
peas  and  add  to  the  cup  of  peas  three  pints 
of  cold  water.  Do  not  let  the  liquid  catch 
on  the  sides  of  the  pan  in  which  the  peas  are 
simmering.  When  the  peas  are  soft,  rub 
them  through  a  strainer  and  put  them  on  to 
boil  again,  adding  one  tablespoonful  of  but- 
ter, one  of  flour,  one-half  teaspoonful  of 
sugar  and  a  teaspoonful  of  salt.  You  don't 
need  pepper — better  leave  pepper  at  home 
and  if  you  get  so  that  you  don't  miss  it  in 
camp,  then  you  need  never  use  it  again.  It 
is  wretched  stuff,  anyway,  doing  more  to 
harm  the  human  stomach  than  almost  any 
other  food  poison  in  use. 

Baked  beans,  too,  make  a  prime  dish  for 
camp  life,  partly,  I  suppose,  because,  like 
corn  meal  and  pea  and  bean  soups,  potatoes 
and  the  heartier  kinds  of  food,  they  are  so 
satisfying  to  the  camper's  appetite.  It  isn't 
necessary  to  cook  your  beans  with  pork,  sub- 

59 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

stitute  some  kind  of  nut  butter,  peanut  but- 
ter or  almond  butter,  or  plenty  of  fresh  dairy 
butter.  The  quart  of  pea  beans  should  be 
soaked  in  cold  water  over  night.  In  the 
morning  these  beans  must  be  put  into  fresh 
water  and  allowed  to  cook  until  they  are  soft 
but  not  broken.  Empty  them  into  a  colan- 
der and  then  put  them  in  the  bean  pot,  or  if 
you  haven't  a  bean  pot,  a  deep  baking  dish 
will  do.  Put  in  a  quarter  of  a  cup  of  mo- 
lasses and  a  half  cup  of  butter  and  pour  a 
little  hot  water  over  the  beans.  Keep  them 
all  day  long  in  an  oven  that  is  not  too  hot. 
Don't  put  any  mustard  in  your  beans;  mus- 
tard is  as  great  an  enemy  to  the  human 
stomach  as  pepper,  and  that  is  saying  a  good 
deal. 

Against  a  rainy  day  when  you  may  wish  to 
amuse  yourselves  with  additional  dishes,  or 
a  hungry  day  when  you  are  cold  and  raven- 
ous, I  will  add  a  few  more  recipes.  Corn 
pone  is  good.  This  is  just  corn  bread  baked 

60 


LOG-CABIN    COOKERY 

on  a  heated  stone  propped  up  before  the  fire 
till  the  surface  is  seared.  Then  cover  with 
hot  ashes  and  let  it  bake  in  them  for  twenty 
minutes.  After  that  dust  your  cake  and  eat 
it.  I  have  told  you  how  to  make  corn  meal 
mush.  With  butter  and  sugar  (in  case  you 
have  no  milk)  it  is  excellent.  What  do  you 
say  to  some  buckwheat  cakes  on  a  cold, 
rainy  night?  If  you  say  "yes,"  all  you  have 
to  do  is  to  mix  the  self-raising  buckwheat 
flour  with  a  proper  amount  of  water  and 
drop  some  good-sized  spoonfuls  into  a  hot, 
greased  frying-pan.  The  turning  of  hot 
cakes  is  the  next  best  fun  to  eating  them. 
Mash  your  boiled  potatoes,  season  with  but- 
ter and  salt  and  milk  if  you  have  it.  After 
that,  call  it  mashed  potato.  It  is  good  to  eat 
and  keeps  well  for  pate  cakes  or  a  scallop. 
When  hungry,  fried  potatoes  can  be  eaten 
with  impunity  by  the  most  zealous  dietarian. 
Fried  potatoes  are  naughty  but  nice.  Mush- 
rooms are  nice,  too,  but  dangerous.  If  you 

61 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

have  a  trained  botanist  or  someone  who  has 
always  gathered  mushrooms  for  eating,  then 
perhaps  it  will  be  safe  to  cook  this  bounty 
the  woods  spread  before  you.  If  you  must 
have  bacon  you  cannot  get  bacon  that  is  too 
good.  Ferris  bacon  and  hams  are  the  finest 
and  most  reliable  cured  pork  in  this  country. 
And  since  we  are  speaking  of  pork  and  there- 
fore of  frying,  let  me  give  you  one  caution: 
Never  use  the  frying-pan  when  you  can  avoid 
doing  so.  No  amount  of  care  can  make  fried 
foods  altogether  wholesome.  Even  an  out- 
of-door  life  cannot  altogether  counteract  the 
bad  effects  of  fried  food.  You  can  make 
good  broth  from  small  diced  bits  of  game  or 
whatever  meat  you  have,  when  the  meat  is 

• 

tender,  add  vegetables  and  allow  the  whole 
to  boil  for  some  time.  Chowder,  too,  is  a 
standard  dish  for  camp  life.  Take  out  the 
bones  from  the  fish  and  cut  up  fish  into  small 
pieces.  "Cover  the  bottom  of  the  kettle  with 
layers  in  the  following  order:  slices  of  pork, 

62 


LOG-CABIN    COOKERY 

sliced  raw  potatoes,  chopped  onions,  fish, 
hard  biscuit  soaked  (or  bread).  Repeat  this 
(leaving  out  pork)  until  the  pot  is  nearly 
full.  Season  each  layer.  Cover  barely  with 
water  and  cook  an  hour  or  so  over  a  very 
slow  fire.  When  thick  stir  gently.  Any 
other  ingredients  that  are  at  hand  may  be 
added."  (Seneca's  "Canoe  and  Camp  Cook- 
ery" and  Breck's  "Way  of  the  Woods." )  A 
white  sauce  for  fish  and  other  purposes  will 
be  found  useful.  Melt  tablespoonful  of  but- 
ter in  saucepan;  stir  in  dessert-spoonful  of 
flour;  add  */>  teaspoonful  salt;  mix  with  a 
cup  of  milk.  Except  for  the  ginger,  ginger- 
bread is  not  a  bad  cake  for  the  woods.  One 
cup  of  molasses,  one  cup  of  sugar,  one  tea- 
spoonful  of  ginger,  one  teaspoonful  of  soda, 
one  cup  of  hot  water,  flour  enough  to  form  a 
medium  batter,  y2  cup  melted  butter,  and  a 
little  cinnamon  will  make  it.  You  might 
experiment  with  Chinese  tea  cakes  made  with 
%  cup  butter,  one  cup  brown  sugar,  %  tea- 

63 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

spoonful  soda,  one  tablespoonful  of  cold 
water,  and  one  cup  of  flour.  Shape  this  mix- 
ture into  small  balls,  and  put  on  buttered 
sheets  and  bake  in  a  hot  oven.  Molasses 
cookies  are  good  and  substantial,  not  a  bad 
thing  to  put  in  the  duffle  bag  on  a  day's 
tramp.  Use  one  cup  of  molasses,  one  tea- 
spoonful  of  ginger,  one  teaspoonful  of  soda, 
two  teaspoonfuls  of  warm  water  or  milk,  J^> 
cup  of  butter,  enough  flour  to  mix  soft.  Dis- 
solve the  soda  in  milk.  Roll  dough  one-third 
of  an  inch  thick  and  cut  in  small  rounds. 
Two  well  known  candy  recipes  will  add 
to  the  pleasures  of  a  rainy  day  and  a 
sweet  tooth.  Penuche:  Two  cups  brown 
sugar,  %  cup  milk,  butter  size  of  a  small  nut, 
pinch  of  salt,  one  teaspoonful  of  vanilla,  l/2 
cup  walnut  meats.  Boil  the  first  four  ingre- 
dients until  soft  ball  is  formed  when  dropped 
in  water.  Then  add  vanilla  and  nuts,  and 
beat  until  cool  and  creamy.  Fudge:  2  cups 
sugar,  %  cup  milk,  3  tablespoonfuls  cocoa,  a 

64 


LOG-CABIN    COOKERY 

pinch  of  salt,  butter  size  of  small  nut,  J/£  cup 
walnut  meats  if  desired.  Cook  same  as 
penuche. 

Perhaps,  in  conclusion,  I  should  advise 
you  to  learn  something  about  the  boiling  of 
vegetables  and  tell  you  not  to  cut  the  top  off 
a  beet  unless  you  want  to  see  it  bleed,  and 
lose  the  better  part  of  it.  Put  your  beet  in, 
top  and  all.  When  cooked,  it  will  be  time 
enough  to  cut  it  and  pare  it.  Be  sure  if  you 
cook  cabbage  that  it  is  cooked  long  enough, 
and  has  become  thoroughly  tender.  The 
same  is  true  with  parsnips  and  carrots.  If 
you  are  in  a  hurry  slice  up  your  carrots  or 
parsnips  or  cabbage  or  potatoes  and  they 
will  cook  more  rapidly. 

Be  sure  that  your  camp  dietary  has  plenty 
of  stewed  fruits  in  it.  That  will  be  so  much 
to  the  good  in  the  camp  health.  A  bottle  of 
olive  oil  also  will  prove  a  great  resource;  in 
fact,  a  can  of  olive  oil  would  be  even  more 
practical  and  the  oil  is  always  capital  food. 

6s 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

Although  the  most  elaborate  recipes  are 
given  for  making  a  mayonnaise  dressing  it 
is  really  very  simple  to  make,  and  once  made 
can  be  kept  on  hand  as  "stock."  I  have 
been  making  mayonnaise  since  I  was  a  little 
girl,  and,  as  I  cook  something  like  the  pro- 
verbial darky,  I  do  not  know  that  I  am  able 
to  give  you  any  hard  and  fast  directions  for 
making  the  dressing.  With  me  it  is  an  af- 
fair of  impulse;  I  use  either  the  white  of  an 
egg  or  the  whole  egg,  it  does  not  make  any 
difference — the  shell  you  will  not  find  pala- 
table— beating  it  up  thoroughly,  gradually 
adding  the  oil,  putting  in  a  little  lemon  juice 
from  time  to  time  and  plenty  of  salt.  Cay- 
enne pepper  is  ordinarily  used  in  mayon- 
naise, but  if  the  dressing  is  properly  sea- 
soned with  salt  and  lemon  it  needs  neither 
cayenne  nor  mustard.  What  it  does  need  is 
thorough  and  long  beating,  a  cool  place,  and 
a  few  minutes  in  which  to  harden  after  it  is 
made. 

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LOG-CABIN    COOKERY 

You  will  learn  one  thing  in  the  woods 
which  perhaps  will  be  a  surprise.  In  that 
life  it  is  men  who  are  the  good  cooks.  In- 
deed, it  is  surprising  how  much  cleverness 
men  show  in  domestic  ways  when  they  are 
left  to  their  own  devices  and  how  helpless 
they  become  as  soon  as  a  woman  is  around. 
If  you  go  astray  any  woodsman,  any  guide, 
almost  any  "sport"  can  help  you  out  in  the 
mysteries  of  cooking. 


CHAPTER   VI 

THE  PLACE  TO  CAMP 

FOR  most  girls  the  place  in  which  they 
are  to  camp  will  depend  very  largely 
on  the  locality  in  which  they  live. 
But  few  people  want  to,  or  feel  that  they 
can,  travel  long  distances  to  secure  their 
ideal  camping  ground.  Yet  there  are  some 
things  about  the  place  to  camp  which  most 
of  us  can  demand  and  get.  When  one  has 
learned  a  little  of  the  art  of  camping,  it  is 
really  surprising  how  many  good  camping 
grounds  may  be  found  in  one's  own  imme- 
diate neighborhood. 

The  first  question  to  be  decided  is  the  sort 
of  expedition  which  we  shall  undertake.  Are 
we  going  to  rough  it  for  a  few  days  or  a 
couple  of  weeks,  taking  things  as  they  come 
and  not  expecting  any  of  the  comforts  we 

68 


THE  PLACE  TO  CAMP 

ordinarily  have?  Are  we  going  to  sleep  in 
the  open,  cook  and  eat  in  the  open?  If  we 
are  to  "pack"  all  that  we  shall  have  along 
with  us,  is  it  to  be  a  river  trip  or  a  lake 
trip  in  a  canoe?  Is  it  to  be  a  walking  expe- 
dition or  with  horses?  The  least  expensive 
item  will  prove  to  be  the  one  that  involves 
taking  the  fewest  number  of  guides,  and 
which  is  carried  out  on  shank's  mare.  Every 
expedition  which  is  continually  on  the  move 
through  an  isolated  and  rough  country 
should  be  equipped  with  one  guide  to  each 
two  people.  If  it  is  a  stationary  camp,  one 
guide  to  three  or  four  people  will  be  the 
minimum.  But  that  is  the  minimum.  Reg- 
istered guides  command  big  pay  for  their 
work,  usually  about  three  dollars  a  day,  and 
their  food  and  lodging  provided  for  them. 

When  we  cannot  make  up  for  our  over- 
sight or  mistakes  or  stupidities  by  trotting 
around  the  corner  to  procure  what  we  have 
forgotten,  or  taking  up  a  telephone  and  or- 

69 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

dering  it  sent  to  us,  or  sending  a  message  to 
the  doctor,  who  must  come  because  we  have 
exhausted  ourselves,  or  got  indigestion  from 
badly  planned  and  badly  cooked  food,  it  be- 
hooves us  to  be  careful.  Only  a  word  to  the 
wise  is  necessary.  To  use  a  slang  phrase 
which  contains  in  a  nutshell  almost  all  that 
need  be  said  on  the  subject:  don't  bite  off 
more  than  you  can  chew.  If  you  are  start- 
ing out  on  a  strenuous  walking  expedition, 
be  sure  that  all  in  the  party  are  accustomed 
to  hard  walking  and  are  properly  shod  and 
in  fit  condition  for  the  work.  With  these 
requirements  attended  to,  your  duffle  bags 
full  of  the  right  shelter  and  food  stuff,  a 
capable  man  or  capable  men  in  charge  of 
the  expedition,  there  is  nothing  in  the  world 
which  could  be  better  for  a  group  of  healthy 
girls  than  a  walking  tour.  I  have  walked 
scores  of  miles  with  my  own  little  pack  on 
my  back  and  been  all  the  better  for  the  hard 
work  and  the  hard  living.  More  of  us  need 

70 


THE  PLACE  TO  CAMP 

hard  living  as  a  corrective  for  our  over-civ- 
ilized lives  than  we  need  luxuries.  If  it  is 
a  canoe  trip,  it  is  well  for  several  members 
of  the  party  to  know  how  to  paddle  and  even 
to  pole  up  over  the  "rips"  of  quickwater. 
Thank  fortune  that  the  girl  of  to-day  has 
sloughed  off  some  of  the  inane  traits  sup- 
posed to  be  excusably  feminine,  such,  for  ex- 
ample, as  screaming  when  frightened.  The 
modern  girl  doesn't  need  to  be  told  that 
screaming  and  jumping  when  she  goes  down 
her  first  quickwater  in  a  canoe  are  distinctly 
out  of  order.  I  remember  one  experience  in 
quickwater  when  I  was  not  sure  but  that  I 
should  have  to  jump  literally  for  my  life.  In 
some  way  the  Indian  with  whom  I  was  had 
got  his  setting  pole  caught  in  the  rocks,  and 
we  were  swung  around  sidewise  over  a  four- 
foot  drop  of  raging  water.  If  the  pole 
loosened  before  we  could  get  the  nose  of  the 
canoe  pointed  down  stream,  the  end  was  in- 
evitable. No  one  could  have  lived  in  those 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

raging  waters.  The  canoe  would  have  been 
rolled  over  and  we  pounded  to  pieces  or 
crushed  upon  the  rocks.  We  clawed  the 
racing  water  madly  with  the  paddles,  which 
seemed,  for  all  the  good  they  could  do,  more 
like  toothpicks  than  paddles.  But  slowly, 
inch  by  inch,  straining  every  muscle,  we  man- 
aged to  work  around.  Needless  to  say,  we 
escaped  unharmed,  except  for  a  wetting.  In 
this  case  as  always,  a  miss  is  as  good  as  a 
mile — a  little  umiss"  which  was  most  cor- 
dially received  by  me.  The  Indian  said 
nothing,  but  I  noticed  that  there  was  some 
expression  in  his  face  while  this  adventure 
was  going  on,  and  that  is  saying  a  good  deal 
for  an  Indian. 

After  some  of  the  questions  connected 
with  the  kind  of  expedition  are  thought  out, 
it  is  just  as  well  to  consider  the  place  in 
which  one  wishes  to  camp,  for  that  will  de- 
termine much  else.  All  things  being  equal, 
it  is  well  to  get  a  sharp  contrast  in  locality, 

72 


THE  PLACE  TO  CAMP 

because  that  means  the  maximum  of  change 
and  tonic.  In  my  experience  there  are  only 
two  kinds  of  camping  grounds  to  be  avoided 
— no,  I  will  say  three.  First,  there  is 
swampy,  malarial  land,  infested  by  mos- 
quitoes and  other  unpleasant  creatures. 
Second,  there  is  ground  on  which  no  water 
can  be  found.  Camp  life  without  access  to 
water  is  an  impossible  proposition.  And 
thirdly — a  possibility  fortunately  which  does 
not  occur  in  many  localities — ground  that  is 
infested  by  venomous  snakes  is  unsafe.  Even 
in  so  beautiful  and  fertile  a  region  as  the 
Connecticut  Valley,  where  I  live  when  not  at 
my  camp  in  the  Moosehead  region,  and 
where  I  frequently  go  camping,  the  question 
of  snakes  has  to  be  taken  into  consideration. 
I  have  encountered  both  the  rattlesnake  and 
the  copperhead,  two  of  the  most  deadly  rep- 
tiles known,  in  the  Connecticut  Valley. 

If,  when  you  are  at  home,  you  live  on  land 
that  is  low,  and  high  land  is  accessible  for 

73 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

< 

your  expedition,  I  think  you  cannot  do  bet- 
ter than  camp  on  the  hills  or  the  mountains. 
On  the  other  hand,  if  you  are  ordinarily  ac- 
customed to  living  among  the  hills,  a  camp- 
ing ground  on  low  land  by  sea  or  lake  will 
bring  you  the  greatest  change.  Some  girls 
might  prefer  to  camp  deep  in  the  very  heart 
of  the  woods.  Personally  I  do  not.  I  think 
it  is  likely  to  be  very  damp  there,  and  to  be 
so  enclosed  on  every  side  that  the  life  grows 
dull.  I  like  a  camping  ground  on  the  shore 
of  a  pond,  or  on  a  hill  side  with  a  big  out- 
look, or  at  the  mouth  of  a  river. 

One  of  the  most  beautiful  camping 
grounds  I  have  ever  known  is  in  a  deserted 
apple  orchard  miles  away  from  civilization. 
Once  upon  a  time  there  was  a  farm  there, 
but  the  buildings  were  all  burned  down.  Re- 
mote, perfect,  sheltered,  I  often  think  the 
original  Garden  of  Eden  could  not  have  been 
more  beautiful.  And  there  is  the  original 
apple  tree,  but  in  this  case  most  seductive  as 

74 


THE  PLACE  TO  CAMP 

apple  sauce.  You  make  a  mistake  if,  before 
you  get  up  your  camp  appetite,  you  assume 
that  apple  sauce  need  not  be  taken  into  ac- 
count. When  your  camp  appetite  is  up,  you 
will  find  that  the  original  sauce  on  buttered 
bread  will  put  you  into  the  original  para- 
disaic mood.  And  there  are  all  sorts  of  ex- 
tension of  the  apple  that  are  as  good  as  they 
are  harmless,  apple  pie,  apple  dumpling,  ap- 
ple cake,  and  baked  apples. 

It  may  not  seem  romantic  to  you,  but  you 
will  find  it  practical  and,  after  all,  delight- 
ful to  camp  a  mile  or  so  away  from  a  good 
farmhouse,  as  far  out  on  the  edge  of  the 
wilderness  as  you  can  get,  for,  the  farm 
within  walking  distance,  it  is  possible  to  have 
a  great  variety  of  food:  fresh  milk  and 
cream,  eggs,  an  occasional  chicken,  new  po- 
tatoes, and  other  vegetables  in  season.  With 
the  farm  nearby,  you  can  say,  as  in  the 
"Merry  Wives  of  Windsor" :  "Let  the  sky 
rain  potatoes!"  and  you  have  your  wish  ful- 

75 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

filled.  It  is  probable,  too,  that  the  farmer 
in  such  an  isolated  region  will  be  glad  to 
help  in  pitching  the  tents,  in  lugging  what- 
ever needs  to  be  lugged  from  the  nearest 
village  or  station,  in  making  camp  generally 
and,  finally,  in  striking  the  camp.  It  is  likely 
that  for  a  reasonable  sum  he  will  be  glad  to 
let  you  have  one  of  his  nice  big  farm  Dob- 
bins and  an  old  buggy  for  cruising  around 
the  country.  In  any  event,  choose  ground 
that  affords  a  good  run-off  and  is  dry;  select 
a  sheltered  spot  where  the  winds  will  not 
beat  heavily  upon  your  tents,  and  never  for- 
get that  clean  drinking  water  is  one  of  the 
first  essentials.  Keep  away  from  contami- 
nated wells  and  all  uncertain  supplies.  With 
these  injunctions  in  mind,  you  can  find  only 
a  happy,  healthful,  invigorating  home  among 
the  "primitive  pines"  or  under  the  original 
apple  tree. 


CHAPTER    VII 

CAMP  FIRES 

"The  way  to  prevent  big  fires  is  to  put  them  out  while 
they  are  small." — CHIEF  FORESTER  GRAVES. 

LIGHTLY  do  we  go  into  the  woods, 
bent  upon  a  holiday.  There  we 
kindle  a  fire  over  which  we  are 
to  cook  our  camp  supper.  How  good  it  all 
smells,  the  wood  smoke,  the  odor  of  the 
frying  bacon  and  fish  and  potatoes;  how 
good  in  the  crisp  evening  air  the  warmth  of 
the  camp  fire  feels;  and  above  all,  how  beau- 
tiful everything  is,  the  deep  plumy  branches 
on  whose  lower  sides  shadows  from  the  fire- 
light dance,  the  depth  of  darkness  beyond 
the  reach  of  the  illuminating  flame,  the  rich 
strange  hue  of  the  soft  grass  and  moss  on 
which  we  are  sitting!  It  is  all  beautiful  with 
not  a  suggestion  of  evil  or  terror  about  it, 

77 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

and  yet,  unchecked,  there  is  a  demon  of  de- 
struction in  that  jolly  little  camp  fire  before 
which  we  sit.  Now  the  supper!  Nothing 
ever  tasted  better,  nothing  can  ever  taste  so 
good  again,  the  fish  and  bacon  done  to  a 
turn,  the  potatoes  lying  an  inviting  brown 
in  the  frying  pan,  and  the  hot  cocoa,  made 
with  condensed  milk,  steaming  up  into  the 
cool  evening  air. 

After  supper  we  lie  about  the  fire  and 
sing  or  dream.  Perhaps  some  one  tells  a 
story.  The  hours  go  so  rapidly  that  we  do 
not  know  where  they  have  gone.  And  when 
the  evening  is  over?  The  fire  is  still  glow- 
ing, a  bed  of  bright  coral  coals  and  gray  ash. 
The  fire  will  just  go  out  if  we  leave  it.  Be- 
sides, we  haven't  time  to  fetch  water  to  put 
it  out  with.  No,  nine  chances  out  of  ten,  if 
we  leave  the  fire  it  will  not  go  out,  but  smoul- 
der on,  and  a  breeze  coming  up  in  the  night 
or  at  dawn,  the  fire  springs  into  flame  again, 
catching  on  the  surrounding  dry  grass  and 

78 


NESSMUK   RANGE. 


'/ 


SMALL  COOK   FIRE. 


79 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

pine  needles.  Soon,  incredibly  soon,  it  be- 
gins to  leap  up  the  trunks  of  trees.  Before 
we  know  it,  it  is  springing  from  tree  to  tree, 
faster  than  a  man  can  leap  or  run. 

In  dry  weather  you  and  I  could  go  out  into 
the  woods  anywhere,  and  with  a  match  not 
much  bigger  than  a  good-sized  darning 
needle,  set  a  blaze  that  would  sweep  over  a 
whole  county,  or  from  county  to  county,  or 
from  state  to  state.  Millions  of  dollars' 
worth  of  damage  would  be  done,  and  the 
chances  are  that  the  careless,  wanton  act 
would  be  the  means  of  having  us  put  into 
prison — which  is  precisely  where,  given  such 
circumstances,  we  should  be. 

Have  we  ever  stopped  to  think  for  a  mo- 
ment, we  who  camp  so  joyfully,  what  loss 
and  injury  such  carelessness  on  our  part  may 
mean  to  a  whole  community?  To  begin 
with,  there  are  the  forests  themselves,  and 
all  they  represent  in  actual  timber,  in  prom- 
ise for  future  growth,  and  in  security  for 

80 


CAMP  FIRES 

rain  supply.  Then  in  fighting  the  fire  thou- 
sands of  dollars'  worth  of  wages  will  have 
to  be  paid  and  hundreds  of  men's  lives  will 
be  in  danger.  The  sweep  and  fury  of  such 
forest  fires,  unless  one  has  lived  in  the  neigh- 
borhood of  one  as  I  have,  is  beyond  the  com- 
prehension or  the  imagination.  Burning 
brands  are  blown  sixty  feet  and  more  over 
the  tops  of  the  highest  trees  and  the  heads 
of  the  men  who  are  fighting  the  fire.  Be- 
fore they  can  check  the  blaze  of  the  fire 
nearest  them,  one  beyond  them  has  already 
been  started. 

Also  there  are  the  life  aspects,  big  and 
small,  of  such  a  fire.  Not  only  are  the  lives 
of  the  men  who  fight  the  blaze  endangered, 
but  all  the  homes,  camps,  farmhouses,  vil- 
lages, and  their  inmates  are  in  imminent  risk. 
What  it  has  taken  others  years  to  gather  to- 
gether, to  construct,  may  be  swept  away  in 
a  few  hours.  Helpless  old  people,  equally 
helpless  little  children- -all  may  be  burned. 

81 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

Beyond  this  question  of  human  life,  which 
every  one  will  admit  is  a  very  great  one,  is 
still  another  which,  I  am  sorry  to  say,  will 
not  seem  so  important  to  some  girls.  Maybe 
it  is  not,  but  if  you  have  ever  heard  the 
screams  of  an  animal,  terrified  by  fire,  being 
burned  to  death,  as  I  have;  if  you  have  ever 
heard  the  blind  frenzied  terror  of  the  stam- 
pede which  takes  place,  the  beating  of  hoofs 
and  the  screams  of  creatures  that  are  trying 
to  escape,  but  do  not  know  how,  as  I  have 
heard  them — then  you  will  have  a  new  sense 
of  the  tragedy  which  a  forest  fire  means  to 
the  creatures  of  the  forest.  Of  a  forest  fire 
it  may  be  said,  as  of  an  evil,  that  there  is 
absolutely  no  good  in  it:  it  is  all  bad,  all  de- 
vastating, all  injurious. 

In  a  forest  fire  scores,  hundreds,  thou- 
sands of  wild  creatures  are  killed,  those  lit- 
tle creatures  which,  given  the  chance,  are  so 
friendly  with  their  human  brothers.  Think, 
the  little  chickadees,  tame,  gay,  resourceful, 

82 


CAMP  FIRES 

filling  even  the  winter  woods  with  their 
song,  the  tiny  wrens,  the  beautiful  thrushes, 
the  squirrels  and  chipmunks,  who  need  only 
half  an  invitation  and  something  on  the  table 
to  accept  your  offer  of  a  nut  cutlet,  the  rabbit 
who  lets  you  come  within  a  few  feet  of  him 
while  he  still  nibbles  grass,  and  looks  trust- 
ingly at  you  out  of  his  round  prominent  eyes, 
the  bear  that  thrusts  his  head  out  of  the  edge 
of  the  woods,  full  of  curiosity  to  see  what 
you  are  doing,  the  deer,  even  the  little  fawn, 
who  will  become  your  playmate  and  take 
sugar  from  your  hand — all  these  trusting, 
interested,  friendly  creatures  are  killed  by 
the  hundreds  of  thousands  in  a  forest  fire. 
The  smoke  stifles  them,  the  loud  reports  of 
the  wood  gases  escaping  from  the  burning 
trees  terrify  them,  and  the  light  and  heat 
confuse  them.  It  is  difficult  to  find  a  single 
good  thing  to  say  for  a  forest  fire.  It  spells 
devastation,  loss,  untold  suffering,  and  in  its 
path  there  is  only  desolation.  The  merciful 

83 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

fire-weed  springs  up  after  it,  trying  with  its 
summer  flame  to  cover  the  black  ravage, 
the  gutted  ground,  where  the  demon  has 
burned  deep  into  the  peaty  subsoil.  Every- 
where one  sees  what  an  awful  fight  for  life 
has  taken  place:  thousands  of  little  birds, 
suffocated  by  the  smoke,  have  dropped  into 
the  flames,  thousands  of  creatures,  tortured 
by  the  heat,  have  rushed  into  the  fire  instead 
of  away  from  it.  Worse  than  the  flood  is 
fire,  because  the  suffering  is  so  much  the 
greater.  Somehow  there  is  something  ut- 
terly, irredeemably  tragic  to  any  one  who 
has  gone  over  these  great  fire-swept  stretches 
of  land  in  our  country;  the  thick  stagnant 
water  that  is  left,  the  charred  bones,  and 
the  look  of  waste  which  shall  never  meet  in 
the  space  of  a  human  life  with  repair. 

No  time  to  put  out  the  camp  fire?  That 
little  fire  will  just  go  out  of  itself,  will  it? 
Yes,  probably,  when  it  has  accomplished 
what  I  have  described  for  you,  when  it  has 

84 


CAMP  FIRES 

killed  happy  life,  razed  the  beautiful  trees, 
gutted  out  the  earth,  and  devoured,  careless 
of  agony,  all  that  it  will  have.  Fire  is  the 
dragon  of  our  modern  wilderness,  and  it  will 
be  glutted  and  gorged,  and  not  satisfied  until 
it  is.  That  jolly  little  camp  fire  is  worth 
keeping  an  eye  on,  it  is  worth  the  trouble, 
even  if  we  have  to  go  half  a  mile  to  fetch  it, 
to  get  a  pail  of  water  and  ring  the  embers 
around  with  the  wret  so  that  the  fire  cannot 
spread.  Never  leave  a  camp  fire  burning; 
no  registered  guide  would  do  such  a  thing, 
and  no  sportsman.  It  is  only  those  who 
don't  know  or  who  are  criminally  careless 
who  would.  If  the  public  will  not  take  re- 
sponsibility in  this  matter,  the  fire  wardens 
are  helpless.  Some  enemies  these  men  must 
inevitably  fight:  the  lightning  which  strikes  a 
dead,  punky  stump  in  the  midst  of  dry 
woods,  which,  smouldering  a  long  while,  fi- 
nally bursts  into  flame;  the  spark  from  an 
engine;  even  spontaneous  combustion  due  to 

85 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

imprisoned  gases  acted  upon  by  sun-heat. 
But  there  is  one  enemy  which  the  fire  war- 
dens should  not  need  to  meet,  and  that  is 
man:  the  boy  or  girl  camping,  the  man  who 
drops  a  cigar  stump  or  match  carelessly  onto 
dry  leaves,  the  hunter  who  uses  combustible 
wadding  in  his  shotgun.  Let  us  help  the  fire 
wardens,  those  men  who  live  on  lonely  moun- 
tain summits  or  in  the  midst  of  the  wilder- 
ness with  eyes  ever  vigilant  to  detect  the 
starting  of  a  fire — let  us  help,  I  say,  these 
fire  wardens  to  get  rid  of  one  nuisance  at 
least,  and  let  us  keep  our  great,  cool,  won- 
derful American  forests  as  beautiful  as  they 
have  ever  been  and  should  always  be  for 
those  who  are  in  a  holiday  humor. 


CHAPTER    VIII 

OTHER    SMOKE 


1 


will  not  be  much  opportu- 
nity to  dwell  on  all  the  wealth  of 
information  that  comes  to  the 
real  camper.  The  life  of  the  woods  is  not 
only  a  lively  one,  but  one  teeming  with  intel- 
ligences and  the  kind  of  information  which 
one  can  get  no  place  else.  My  years  of 
camping  have  stored  my  mind  full  of  pic- 
tures and  full  of  memories  about  which  I 
could  write  indefinitely.  In  the  practical  ac- 
tivities of  camp  life  we  mustn't  forget  that 
the  silent  wonderful  life  of  the  wilderness 
is  ours  to  study  if  we  but  bring  keen  eyes  to 
it,  quick  hearing  and  receptive  minds. 

Let  me  tell  you  of  one  experience  which 
I  had  some  four  years  ago  on  the  edge  of  a 
solitary  little  pond  in  the  forest  wilderness. 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

Our  way  lay  over  a  narrow  trail,  now 
through  birches  full  of  light,  then  through 
maples,  past  spruce  and  other  trees,  down, 
down,  down  toward  the  little  pond  which  lay 
like  a  jewel  at  the  bottom  of  a  hollow.  It 
was  a  favorite  spot  for  beavers  and  we  were 
going  to  watch  them  work.  Their  rising 
time  is  sundown,  so  we  should  be  there  be- 
fore they  were  up.  It  was  growing  quieter 
and  quieter  in  the  ever-quiet  woods,  and  when 
we  hid  ourselves  behind  some  bushes  near 
the  edge  of  the  pond  on  the  opposite  side 
from  the  beaver  houses,  there  was  scarcely 
a  sound,  and  the  drip  of  the  water  from  a 
heron's  wings  as  the  bird  mounted  in  flight, 
seemed  astonishingly  loud. 

Soon  the  beavers,  unaware  of  us,  came 
out  of  their  houses  and  began  to  work, 
steadily  and  silently.  We  knew  them  for 
what  they  were,  builders  of  dams,  of 
bridges,  of  houses,  mighty  in  battle  so  that 
a  single  stroke  from  their  broad  flat  tails 

88 


OTHER  SMOKE 

kills  a  dog  instantly,  wood  cutters,  carriers 
of  mud  and  stone — animals  endowed  with 
almost  human  intelligence  and  with  an  in- 
dustry greater  than  human.  And  I  never 
saw  work  done  more  quietly,  efficiently  and 
silently  than  I  did  that  night  by  the  edge  of 
Beaver  Pond. 

As  we  sat  there  peering  through  the 
bushes  I  thought  instinctively  of  the  silent 
work  which  we  do  within  ourselves  or  which 
is  done  for  us.  Deep  down  within  us  so 
much  is  going  on  of  which  "we,"  as  we 
speak  of  the  conscious  outer  self,  are  not 
aware.  Take,  for  example,  the  frequent 
and  common  experience  of  forgetting  a  word 
or  a  name.  Despite  the  greatest  effort  we 
cannot  recall  it,  and  finding  ourselves  help- 
less we  dismiss  the  matter  from  our  minds 
and  go  on  to  other  things.  Suddenly,  with- 
out any  seeming  effort  on  our  part  the  word 
has  come  to  us.  Now  this  reveals  a  great 
truth  about  a  great  silent  power :  all  we  have 

89 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

to  do  is  to  set  the  right  forces  to  work  and 
frequently  the  work  is  done  for  us.  With 
this  serviceable  power  within  us,  why  not 
make  use  of  it  habitually?  It  renews  itself 
constantly  and  waits  for  us  to  call  upon  it 
for  protection,  for  comfort,  for  correction 
and  strength.  It  insists  only  that  we  think 
as  nearly  rightly  as  we  can.  Beavers  of  si- 
lence are  busy  within  us. 

Much  of  the  work  of  this  silent  power  is 
done  in  our  sleep-time.  It  is  important, 
therefore,  that  our  last  thoughts  at  night  and 
our  first  in  the  morning  should  be  the  best  of 
which  we  are  capable.  Prayer  is  a  profound 
acknowledgment  of  this  power  within  us. 
We  have  all  heard  the  expression,  "the  night 
brings  counsel."  And  probably  most  of  us 
have  said,  "Oh,  well,  we'll  just  sleep  on 
that!"  Why  "sleep  on  it"?  Because  we 
have  confidence  in  this  silent  power  whose 
processes,  whether  we  sleep  or  wake,  are 
constantly  at  work  within  us,  even  as  night 

90 


OTHER  SMOKE 

and  day,  a  natural  power,  directs  the  growth 
of  tree  and  flower.  Again  we  have  counted 
upon  the  work  of  industrious  beavers  of  si- 
lence— the  silent  workers  within  each  one  of 
us. 

The  woods  are  full  of  lessons  never  to  be 
learned  any  place  else.  Insensibly  are  we, 
in  this  vast  big  intelligent  life  of  the  forest, 
led  on  to  meditate  about  the  things  we  see. 
I  often  wish  not  only  that  I  could  place  my- 
self at  certain  times  in  those  solitary  places 
by  edge  of  pond,  deep  in  forest,  on  the  hill- 
side, following  the  trail,  but  also  that  I 
might  send  a  friend  or  two  to  the  healing 
which  can  be  found  in  the  wilderness.  For 
example,  the  girls  who  find  nothing  but 
troubles  and  vexations  in  life,  who  groan  if 
the  conversation  languishes,  are  likely  to 
have  some  of  their  troubles  slip  away  from 
them  and  their  talk  become  more  cheerful. 
Who  can  be  in  the  woods,  who  can  live  in 
the  great  out  of  doors  and  not  feel  optimis- 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

tic,  at  least  hopeful  and  interested?  To 
every  girl  inclined  to  be  moody,  often  to 
suffer  from  the  conviction  that  living  is  dif- 
ficult and  perhaps  not  worth  while,  I  com- 
mend camp  life.  Activity,  distraction  are  its 
powerful  and  wholesome  remedies  for  mel- 
ancholy. In  that  life  one  is  obliged  to  work 
mind  and  body  much  as  the  beavers  work, 
one's  attention  is  held  to  something  every 
minute.  The  whole  current  of  our  thoughts 
has  been  changed  and  for  the  time  being  we 
are  distracted  from  the  old  bruised  ways  of 
thinking.  The  very  alteration  that  comes 
with  wood  life  gives  us  a  chance  to  think 
rightly.  Who  can  be  troubled  or  bored  or 
bad  tempered  and  follow  the  trail?  Who 
can  be  indifferent  and  be  conscious  of  the 
energy  and  intelligence  of  beaver  and  squir- 
rel, of  rabbit  and  bird,  of  deer  and  moose? 
Soon  the  whole  misery-breeding  brood  of 
cares,  of  doubts,  of  perplexities  that  existed 
before  we  left  our  home  drop  away  from  us. 

92 


OTHER  SMOKE 


We  can  use  the  influence  of  this  vast  sane 
life  of  the  wilderness  for  ourselves  and  by 
its  strength  make  good. 


CHAPTER    IX 

FITTING  UP  THE  CAMP  FOR  USE 

ANY  girl  who  has  crossed  the  ocean 
knows  how  impossible,  the  first 
time  she  entered  her  little  white 
cabin,  that  bit  of  space  looked  as  a  place 
in  which  to  sleep  and  to  spend  part  of  her 
time.  There  seemed  to  be  no  room  in  it 
for  anything;  it  was  difficult  to  turn 
around  in,  there  were  so  few  hooks  on  which 
to  hang  things,  and  the  berth — dear  me,  that 
berth !  So  her  thoughts  ran.  Yet  gradually, 
as  she  learned  the  ropes,  she  was  able  to 
make  it  homelike.  With  experience  she 
learned  that  the  more  bags  she  had  in  which 
to  put  things,  the  easier  it  was  to  keep  this 
little  stateroom  in  order.  The  next  time  she 
took  with  her  every  conceivable  sort  of  bag 
for  every  conceivable  sort  of  object.  Also 

94 


FITTING    UP    THE    CAMP    FOR    USE 

she  had  learned  that  the  more  she  could  do 
without  unnecessary  things  in  her  cabin  and 
steamer  trunk,  the  more  comfort  was  hers 
to  enjoy.  By  the  time  she  had  crossed  the 
ocean  often,  she  had  learned  the  art  of  hav- 
ing little  but  all  that  she  needed  with  her — 
the  art  of  making  herself  comfortable  in  a 
stateroom. 

Even  so  is  there  an  art  in  learning  how  to 
camp,  a  happy  art  of  which  there  is  always 
something  left  to  learn.  The  oldest  camp- 
ers never  get  beyond  the  point  where  they 
can  make  a  slight  improvement  in  their  kit 
or  their  methods.  In  the  end  you  will  work 
out  your  own  salvation  for  the  kind  of  camp- 
ing you  wish  to  do.  It  is  my  intention  to 
point  out  to  you  only  what  might  be  called 
the  ground  plan  of  fitting  up  a  camp  for  use. 
Those  little  individual  adaptations  which 
every  one  of  us  makes,  increasing  familiarity 
with  camp  life  will  help  you  to  make  for 
yourselves. 

95 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

First,  last,  and  always,  when  making  out 
your  camp  lists,  revise  them  carefully  with 
the  idea  of  cutting  out  everything  unneces- 
sary. All  besides  what  you  actually  need 
will  be  clutter.  The  best  way  to  do  is  to 
make  out  your  lists,  putting  down  every- 
thing that  comes  to  you.  Then  go  over  them 
by  yourselves  and  a  second  time  with  some 
one  else.  Your  check  lists  for  camp  are  im- 
portant and  should  always  be  conscientiously 
made  out,  with  nothing  left  to  chance,  noth- 
ing done  hit  or  miss. 

If  you  are  to  furnish  a  camp,  remember 
that  your  packing  boxes  can  do  great  work 
in  helping  to  set  you  up  in  your  new  home. 
In  rough  camping  such  boxes  do  well  for 
dressers,  washstands  and,  with  a  little  car- 
pentry, also  for  clothes  presses.  A  piece  of 
enameled  cloth  on  the  top  of  the  one  to  be 
used  as  a  washstand,  and  a  towel  or  white 
curtain  strung  on  a  string  in  front  of  it,  be- 
hind which  you  can  put  dirty  clothes,  make 


FITTING    UP    THE    CAMP    FOR    USE 

a  thoroughly  satisfactory  article  of  furni- 
ture. In  camp  there  is  no  need  to  think 
about  elegance.  Fitness  and  usefulness  are 
all  the  girl  need  ever  consider.  It  is  aston- 
ishing how  much  beauty  your  homely  cabin 
and  white  tent  will  acquire — a  beauty  all 
their  own. 

For  tent  camping  the  usual  camp  cot  bed 
is  probably  most  satisfactory,  for  it  is  light 
and  readily  carried.  If  you  are  on  the  march 
and  carrying  at  the  most  a  tent  fly  for  pro- 
tection, you  will,  of  course,  sleep  on  bough 
beds  or  browse  beds.  Small,  cut  saplings, 
well  trimmed,  make  good  springs  for  beds. 
Any  guide  can  help  you  to  make  the  beds, 
and  you  would  better  be  about  it  early,  for 
it  takes  a  good  three-quarters  of  an  hour  to 
make  a  comfortable  bough  bed.  Perhaps  a 
few  suggestions  will  not  come  amiss.  You 
will,  of  course,  have  both  good  hunting 
knives,  worn  in  a  leather  sheath  on  a  leather 
belt,  and  belt-sheath  hatchets.  With  the 

97 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR    GIRLS 

hatchet  cut  down  a  stout  little  balsam  tree. 
From  this  break  the  tips  from  the  big 
branches,  having  them  about  one  foot  in 
length.  These  foot-length  stems  make 
good  bed  springs  and  are  the  only  bed 
springs  you  will  have  on  a  balsam  couch  un- 
less you  provide  the  spring  yourself  because 
of  some  green  worm  who  is  industriously 
measuring  off  the  length  of  your  nose,  no 
doubt  in  amazement  that  there  should  be 
anything  so  extraordinarily  long  in  the 
world.  However,  he  is  a  harmless  little 
chap,  and  the  balsam  tree  having  treated 
him  very  kindly,  he  will  be  greatly  surprised 
at  any  other  kind  of  entertainment  which  he 
may  receive  from  you.  Now,  having  got  your 
"feathers,"  select  a  smooth  piece  of  ground 
with  a  slight  slope  toward  the  foot.  Press 
the  stems  of  the  feathers  into  the  earth,  lay- 
ing them  tier  after  tier  as  you  have  seen  a 
roof  shingled,  until  your  bed  is  wide  enough, 
long  enough,  and  soft  enough  to  give  you  a 

98 


\ 


DR.   CARRINGTON'S  SLEEPING  BAG 


'KENWOOD"  SLEEPING  BAG. 


RUSTIC   CAMP  COT. 

99 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR    GIRLS 

good  and  sweet-scented  night  of  sleep  upon 
it.  Lay  a  fair-sized  log  along  each  side  and 
across  the  foot.  This  balsam  bough  bed  can 
be  made  up  as  often  as  you  wish  with  fresh 
feathers.  Place  one  blanket  on  top  and  it  is 
ready  for  your  use.  If  you  have  got  pitch 
on  your  hands  in  doing  this,  rub  them  with 
a  little  butter  or  lard  and  it  will  come  off. 

There  is  still  an  easier  bed  to  make.  A 
bag  of  stout  bed  ticking,  filled  with  leaves 
and  grass,  forms  an  excellent  mattress  and 
has  the  virtue  of  being  portable,  for  the  bag 
can  always  be  emptied,  folded  up,  packed, 
and  refilled  at  the  next  camp  ground.  A  thin 
rubber  blanket  or  poncho  laid  over  this 
makes  it  an  absolutely  dry  bed  at  all  times. 
If  you  are  to  camp  in  a  log  cabin,  probably 
the  most  comfortable  bed  for  you  to  plan  is 
a  spring,  bought  at  the  nearest  village,  and 
nailed  onto  log  posts  a  foot  and  a  half  high. 
With  your  ticking  mattress  filled  with  straw, 
your  day  lived  in  the  great  out  of  doors,  no 

100 


FITTING    UP    THE    CAMP    FOR    USE 


. 


one  will  need  to  wish  you  pleasant  slumber. 
It  is  well  to  have  a  good  supply  of  tarla- 
tan on  hand.  This  is  finer  than  mosquito 
netting  and  therefore  more  impervious  to 
stinging  insects.  If  you  camp  in  June,  or 
the  first  week  or  so  in  July,  you  are  likely 
in  many  parts  of  the  country  to  find  black 
flies,  mosquitoes,  and  midges  to  battle 
against.  There  should  be  enough  tarlatan 
to  use  over  the  camp  bed  and  also  enough  to 
cover  completely  a  hat  with  a  brim  and  to 
fall  down  about  the  neck,  where  it  can  be 
tied  under  the  collar.  A  more  expensive 
head-net  of  black  silk  Brussels  net  can  be 
made.  This  costs  a  good  deal  more,  but 
the  great  advantage  of  it  is,  that  the  black 
does  not  alter  the  colors  of  the  world  out 
upon  which  one  looks.  Don't  make  any 
mistake  about  the  importance  of  some  kind 
of  netting  and  fly  dope,  or  "bug  juice,"  as 
the  antidotes  for  insect  bites  are  sometimes 
called.  There  are  various  kinds  of  fly  dope, 

101 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

any  one  of  which  is  likely  to  prove  useful. 
There  is  an  excellent  recipe  for  the  making 
of  your  own  fly  dope  in  Breck's  "Way  of  the 
Woods,"  which  I  give  here.1  A  tiny  vial  of 
ammonia  will  also  prove  useful.  One  drop 
on  a  bite  will  often  stop  further  poisoning 
from  an  insect  sting.  Inquiries  should  al- 
ways be  made  beforehand  whether  one  is 
likely  to  encounter  black  flies  and  midges. 
Those  who  have  met  them  once  are  not 
likely  to  wish  to  have  a  second  unprotected 
meeting.  They  are  the  pests  of  the  woods 
and  the  wilderness. 

I  will  give,  just  as  they  occur  to  me,  a  few 

1  "Brack's  Dope: 

Pine  tar    3  oz. 

Olive   oil    2    " 

Oil   pennyroyal    1    " 

Citronella       1    " 

Creosote       1    " 

Camphor    (pulverized)     1    " 

Large  tube  carbolated  vaseline. 
Heat  the  tar  and  oil  and  add  the  other  ingredients; 

simmer  over  slow  fire  until  well  mixed.     The  tar  may  be 

omitted  if  disliked." 

102 


FITTING    UP    THE    CAMP    FOR    USE 

other  articles  which  will  be  useful  in  the  camp 
life:  a  small  cake  of  camphor  to  break  over 
things  in  the  knapsack  and  keep  off  crawl- 
ers; a  small  emergency  box  containing  sur- 
geon's plaster  and  the  usual  things;  vaseline, 
witch  hazel;  jack  knife;  tool  kit;  a  map  of 
the  region  in  which  you  are  camping  and  a 
diary  in  which  to  take  notes.  To  these  might 
be  added  sewing  articles,  a  sleeping  bag  if 
you  care  to  use  one,  and  a  folding  brown 
duck  waterpail.  The  catalog  from  any 
sporting  goods  place  will  suggest  a  thousand 
other  articles  which  you  may  care  to  have. 

With  a  few  planks  to  saw  up  into  lengths, 
and  a  few  white  birch  saplings,  a  most  at- 
tractive camp  dinner  table  can  be  made. 
Over  this  a  piece  of  white  oilcloth  should 
be  laid  and  kept  clean  by  the  use  of  a  little 
sapolio.  It  is  best  not  to  buy  an  expensive 
stove  for  the  cabin.  A  second-hand  kitchen 
range,  which  can  be  purchased  for  a  few 
dollars,  will  do  quite  well  for  the  cooking 

103 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

cabin  or  shack,  and  an  open  Franklin  stove 
for  the  living  cabin.  If  one  is  going  to  camp 
in  tents  and  wants  a  stove  in  one  of  them, 
it  will  be  necessary  to  buy  a  regular  tent 
stove.  Anything  else  would  not  be  safe. 

As  far  as  actual  furniture  is  concerned, 
except  for  camp  stools  or  benches  and  camp 
chairs,  if  you  wish  to  be  very  elegant,  the 
camp  is  now  furnished.  But  there  are  still 
to  be  considered  the  necessary  utensils  for 
cooking  and  other  purposes.  I  will  enum- 
erate them  again  just  as  they  occur  to  me, 
and  not  necessarily  in  the  order  of  their  im- 
portance: kerosene  oil  can,  molasses  jug, 
pails,  a  tin  baker,  a  teapot,  tin  and  earthen 
dishes,  tin  and  earthen  cups,  basins  for 
washing,  pans  for  baking  and  for  milk,  dish- 
pans,  dishmop,  double  boiler,  broiler,  knives, 
forks,  teaspoons,  tablespoons,  mixing  spoons, 
pepper  box,  salt  shaker,  nutmeg  grater,  flour 
sifter,  can  opener,  frying  pans — one  with  a 
long  handle  for  use  in  cooking  over  open 

104 


FITTING    UP    THE    CAMP    FOR    USE 

fires — butcher  knife,  bread  knife,  lantern, 
bucket,  egg  beater,  potato  masher,  rolling 
pin,  axe,  hatchet,  nails,  hammer,  toilet  paper, 
woolen  blankets,  rubber  blankets,  crash  for 
dish  towels,  yellow  soap,  some  wire,  twine, 
tacks,  and  a  small  fireless  cooker  if  you  know 
how  to  use  one.  A  good  fireless  cooker  can 
be  built  on  the  premises. 

Possessed  of  these  articles,  any  one  who 
knows  anything  about  the  woods  can  be  most 
comfortable.  They  can,  of  course,  be  added 
to  indefinitely.  One  may  make  camp  life  as 
expensive  and  complicated  as  one  pleases. 
But  to  do  that  seems  a  pity,  for  it  is  against 
the  very  good  and  spirit  of  the  wilderness 
life.  The  wood  life  and  all  its  new  and  in- 
vigorating experience  should  take  us  back  to 
nature.  It  is  for  that  we  go  into  the  wilder- 
ness and  not  to  bring  with  us  the  luxuries  of 
civilization.  Part  of  the  wholesomeness  of 
camp  life  lies  in  learning  to  do  without,  in 
the  fine  simplicity  which  we  are  obliged  to 

105 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

practice  there.  Common  sense  is  the  law  of 
the  wilderness  life,  and  let  us  be  sure  that 
we  follow  that  law. 


CHAPTER   X 

THE  POCKETBOOK 

ONE  of  the  objects  of  some  girls 
on  their  camping  expeditions  is 
to  keep  the  trip  from  becom- 
ing too  expensive.  The  maximum  of  value 
must  be  got  from  the  minimum  of  pence. 
And  I  think  that  is  as  it  should  be,  for, 
with  economy,  the  life  is  kept  nearer  a 
simple  ideal,  is  made  more  active  and  more 
wholesome.  All  sorts  and  conditions  of 
camping  have  been  my  lot,  the  five-dollar-a- 
day  camping  in  a  log  cabin  (  ?)  equipped 
with  running  water  and  a  porcelain  tub,  and 
the  kind  of  camping  one  does  under  a  fly 
with  the  rain  and  sunshine  and  wind  driving 
in  at  their  pleasure.  Although  I  do  not  ad- 
vise the  latter  as  far  as  health  results  are 
concerned,  given  that  the  party  is  in  fair 

107 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

condition  they  will  be  none  the  worse  for  the 
experiment. 

Camping  for  a  party  of  four  or  five  should 
usually  cost  something  between  eight  dollars 
and  eighteen  dollars  apiece  per  week.  This 
rate  includes  a  guide  and  a  good  deal  of 
service,  a  rowboat,  a  canoe,  and  no  care 
about  food.  But  the  longer  I  camp  the  more 
I  am  of  the  opinion  that  the  simpler  and 
more  independent  the  life  is,  the  greater 
health  and  pleasure  it  will  bring.  It  has 
been  said  about  camping,  "Much  for  little: 
much  health,  much  good  fellowship  and  good 
temper,  much  enjoyment  of  beauty — and  all 
for  little  money  and,  rightly  judged,  for  no 
trouble  at  all." 

The  girl  who  is  the  right  sort  gets  more 
fun  out  of  camp  life  when  she  does  at  least 
part  of  the  work  herself.  Let  her  economize 
and  use  her  own  ingenuity  and  do  the  work. 
Any  group  of  three  or  four  girls  can  provide 
all  the  necessary  ugrub"  for  themselves  at  $3 

1 08 


£? 


"TANALITE"  WATERPROOF  WALL  TENT 


KHAKI  STANDARD  ARMY  DUCK  WALL  TENT 


TENT  STOVE-PIPE  HOLE. 


FRAZiR  CANOE  TENT. 


•WATERPROOF    DINING    FLYS    FOR  WALL  TEtCT 


ICQ 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

a  week  per  capita.  This  sum  does  not  in- 
clude rental  or  purchase  of  tent.  A  good 
tent,  7x7,  big  enough  for  two  at  a  pinch, 
can  be  bought  complete  (this  does  not  include 
fly)  for  about  $7.  You  can  get  tents  second- 
hand often  for  a  song,  or  as  a  loan,  or  you 
can  rent  your  tent  for  10  cents  a  day.  Get 
at  least  a  few  numbers  of  one  or  several  of 
the  following  sporting  magazines :  Outing, 
Country  Life  in  America,  Forest  and  Stream, 
Field  and  Stream,  Recreation,  Rod  and  Gun 
in  Canada.  Look  in  the  advertisement  pages 
of  these  magazines  for  the  names  of  sporting 
goods  houses  and  send  for  catalogs.  Then 
choose  your  style  of  tent.  The  different  kinds 
of  tents  are  legion.  The  Kenyon  Take- 
Down  House,  too,  is  a  capital  camp  home. 
It  is  uskeet"-proof  and  fly-proof.  Send  to 
Michigan  for  a  catalog,  and  then  go  like 
the  classic  turtle  with  your  shell  on  your  back. 
In  groups  of  four  or  more,  the  $10  laid  by 
for  a  vacation  should  bring  two  holiday 

no 


THE  POCKETBOOK 

weeks — possibly  a  day  or  so  over;  $15,  three 
weeks  and  a  bit  over,  and  $20  a  whole  glori- 
ous month.  Expensive  camping  may  be  the 
"style"  in  certain  localities,  but  it  is  not  neces- 
sarily the  "fun." 

For  eight  weeks  this  past  summer  my 
family  of  two  members  camped  with  two 
servants.  In  addition  we  had  the  occasional 
services  of  a  man  who  did  all  the  heavy 
work.  There  was  not  enough  for  the  serv- 
ants to  do  in  the  cottage  and  log  cabin  of 
our  establishment.  They  were  discontented, 
faultfinding,  and  wholly  out  of  the  spirit  of 
camp  life.  All  of  the  day  that  their  tone  of 
voice  reached  was  helplessly  ruined.  The 
only  way  to  keep  the  camp  joy  and  pleasure 
was  to  keep  out  of  their  way.  On  our  camp 
table  we  had  silver,  embroidered  linen 
cloths,  the  same  food,  in  almost  the  same 
variety,  that  we  had  it  at  home,  and  the 
same  amount  of  service.  All  I  can  say  is 
that  it  was  a  perfect  nuisance — as  perfectly 

in 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

planned  and  executed  a  nuisance  as  one  could 
well  conceive.  Everywhere  these  servants 
looked  they  found  things  which  did  not  suit 
them.  What  I  think  they  wished  was  a  mod- 
est twenty-thousand-dollar  cottage  in  that 
great  and  wonderful  wilderness. 

In  the  autumn  I  camped  alone  for  two 
weeks  in  a  log  cabin.  I  say  alone.  I  was  not 
alone,  for  I  had  three  friends  with  me — a 
collie  puppy,  a  blind  fawn,  and  a  year-old 
cat.  They  were  the  best  of  companions — 
for  better  I  could  not  have  asked.  I  never 
heard  a  word  of  faultfinding,  and  I  was  wit- 
ness to  a  great  deal  of  joy.  It  is  a  curious 
fact  about  camp  life  that  if  a  girl  has  weak 
places  in  her  character,  if  she  is  selfish  or 
peevish  or  faultfinding  or  untidy,  these 
weaknesses  will  all  come  out.  But  my  four- 
footed  friends  were  good  nature  itself, 
young,  growing,  happy,  contented.  And 
they  had  excellent  appetites.  I  tell  you  this 
because  I  want  you  to  see  how  much  of  an 

112 


FRAME  FOR  BOUGH  LEAN-TO. 


BOUGH  LEAN-TO. 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

item  their  food  was  in  the  expenses  I  shall 
enumerate.  This  might  be  called  a  little  in- 
timate history  of  at  least  one  camp  pocket- 
book.  The  fawn  had  a  quart  of  milk  a  day 
and  much  lettuce,  together  with  the  kind  of 
food  which  deer  live  upon :  leaves,  grass, 
clover,  ferns.  I  had  to  pay  for  her  bedding 
of  hay.  The  puppy  and  the  cat  shared  an- 
other quart  of  milk  between  them.  The  cat 
hunted  by  night,  but  the  puppy  was  fed  en- 
tirely by  hand  on  bread,  milk,  an  occasional 
egg,  cereals,  and  vegetables.  My  own  fare 
consisted  of  all  the  bread  and  butter  I 
wished,  cocoa,  condensed  milk,  bananas,  ap- 
ples, eggs,  potatoes,  beans,  nuts,  raisins, 
cauliflower,  chocolate,  and  a  few  other  ar- 
ticles. And  there  was,  too,  the  denatured 
alcohol  to  be  paid  for — a  heavy  item,  for  I 
used  only  a  chafing  dish  and  a  small  spirit 
lamp.  The  milk  was  eight  cents  a  quart  on 
account  of  the  carriage,  the  butter  was 
thirty-eight  cents  a  pound,  the  eggs  twenty- 

114 


THE  POCKETBOOK 

five  cents  a  dozen.  Except  for  cutting  up 
and  splitting  the  wood  for  my  open  Frank- 
lin stove,  the  wood  cost  me  nothing.  But  I 
paid  a  man  a  dollar  for  half  a  day's  work. 
We  weren't  seven,  but  we  were  four  in  that 
camp  community.  How  much  do  you  think 
the  food  for  all  averaged  per  week  in  those 
two  weeks?  Three  dollars  a  week,  and  we 
had  all  that  we  wanted  and  more,  too. 

When  girls  plan  carefully  and  intelli- 
gently, when  they  exercise  good  sense  in  the 
cooking  and  care  of  food,  there  is  no  reason 
why,  with  a  party  of  four  or  five  girls,  from 
three  dollars  to  four  dollars  apiece  per  week 
should  not  cover  all  living,  exclusive,  of 
course,  of  the  traveling  expenses.  And  the 
camping  can  be  done  for  less.  I  commend 
these  expense  items  to  all  Vacation  Bureaus 
and  to  Camp  Fire  Girls. 

In  the  two  weeks  I  camped  alone  I  was 
very  busy  with  my  writing.  To  this  I  was 
obliged  to  give  most  of  the  daylight.  Be- 

115 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

sides  this,  I  had  much  business  correspond- 
ence to  attend  to.  It  takes  time  to  care  prop- 
erly for  animals,  and  my  pets  had  not  only 
to  be  fed,  but  also  to  be  brushed  and  gen- 
erally cared  for.  I  planned  to  spend  some 
time  every  day  with  the  blind  fawn  so  that 
I  might  amuse  her.  I  did  all  these  things, 

# 

took  care  of  my  little  cabin,  had  time  for  a 
walk  every  afternoon,  and  went  to  bed  when 
the  birds  did,  to  get  up  the  next  morning  at 
five  o'clock.  Had  I  been  able  to  give  my 
thought  entirely  to  the  food  question,  I  am 
certain  that  the  expense  of  these  items  might 
have  been  made  even  less. 

Some  girls  will  think  this  is  getting  back 
to  the  simple  life  with  a  vengeance.  So  it  was 
but  I  can  assure  you  that  those  two  weeks 
were  most  happy  and  profitable  in  every 
way — far  better  than  the  over-served,  over- 
fed months  which  had  preceded  them.  For 
any  girl  who  needs  to  forget  how  superfi- 
cial to  the  real  needs  of  life  the  luxuries  are; 

116 


THE  POCKETBOOK 

for  any  girl  who  is  lazy  in  household  ways; 
for  any  girl  who  needs  character  building; 
for  any  girl  who  is  in  need  of  deep  breath- 
ing and  the  pines;  for  any  girl  who  wants 
more  active  life  than  she  gets  in  her  own 
home;  for  any  girl  who  is  of  an  experi- 
mental or  adventurous  turn  of  mind;  for 
any  girl  who  needs  to  be  drawn  away  from 
her  books;  for  any  girl  who  wants  to  form 
new  friendships  in  a  big,  sane,  and  beautiful 
world  where  the  greetings  are  all  friendly; 
for  any  girl — for  every  girl — who  wants 
much  for  little;  the  log  cabin,  the  tent,  the 
shack  in  the  wilderness,  by  pond  or  lake, 
upon  the  hillsides  or  in  the  valleys,  will 
prove  a  'joy  forever." 


CHAPTER    XI    • 

THE    CAMP    DOG 

WHEN  I  began  to  go  into  the  wil- 
derness to  camp,  I  was  much 
more  credulous  than  I  am  now. 
Everywhere  I  went  in  the  woods  I  saw  an 
implement  which  looked  like  a  cross  between 
a  pickaxe  with  a  long  handle  and  the  largest 
pair  of  tweezers  ever  seen.  This  was  al- 
ways lying  up  against  something  as  if  just 
ready  for  use,  much  as  one  sees  an  axe  rest- 
ing against  a  cabin  wall  or  on  a  chopping 
block.  I  couldn't  make  out  what  this  could 
be  used  for.  Finally,  curiosity  getting  the 
better  of  me  and  no  opportunity  for  seeing 
it  used  offering  itself,  I  asked. 

"Oh,   that,"   answered   the  guide  with  a 
twinkle  in  his  eye,  "that  is  the  camp  dog." 

118 


THE  CAMP  DOG 

"How  nice!"  I  thought.  "Why  is  it 
called  camp  dog?" 

"Well,  you  see  it  does  most  of  the  work 
for  us  and  being  so  faithful  and  handy 
we've  just  got  naturally  into  the  way  of  call- 
ing it  a  camp  dog." 

I  was  still  more  impressed  when  he  gave 
me  then  and  there  several  illustrations  of 
its  usefulness.  But  the  end  of  the  tale  of 
the  camp  dog  is  not  yet, — in  fact  it  was  a 
very  long  tale  for  me,  the  end  of  which  you 
shall  have  in  good  season. 

Generally  speaking  it  may  be  said  that  it 
is  the  guide  and  not  this  implement  which  is 
the  camp  dog.  It  is  he  who  is  faithful,  al- 
ways handy,  always  willing.  And  it  is  he 
who  is  more  imposed  upon  than  any  other 
member  of  the  camp  community.  The  guide 
is  a  responsible  person, — the  responsible 
person.  He  is  usually  registered  and  his 
pay  is  always  good.  He  needs  every  dollar 
he  gets  and  every  bit  of  authority,  too,  for 

119 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

he  works  hard  and  often  for  groups  of 
people  who  are  thorough  in  only  one  re- 
spect and  that  is  in  their  irresponsibility. 
The  guide  has  to  be  sure  that  fires  are  kin- 
dled in  the  right  places  and  that  they  are 
really  out  when  they  should  be;  he  must 
keep  his  party  from  foolhardy  acts  of  any 
kind;  he  must  be  sure  that  they  have  a  good 
time  and  certain  that  they  are  not  overtaxed; 
if  it  comes  off  cold  or  is  cold,  he  must  keep 
them  warm;  he  must  see,  despite  every  vicis- 
situde, that  they  are  enjoying  themselves;  he 
must  do  the  cooking — and  he  must  be  a 
good  cook, — boil  the  coffee,  wash  the 
dishes,  pitch  and  strike  the  tents;  he  must 
pilot  the  members  of  the  party  to  the  best 
places  for  fishing,  often  bait  their  hooks  or 
teach  them  how  to  bait,  dig  their  worms; 
and  give  their  first  lessons  in  casting  a  fly; 
must  instruct  them  in  all  necessary  wood 
craft  and  keep  them  from  shooting  wildly; 
he  must  see  that  the  game  laws  of  the  state 

1 20 


THE  CAMP  DOG 

are  observed,  also  the  fire  laws;  if  anything 
should  happen  to  a  member  of  his  party, 
he  will,  in  all  likelihood,  be  held  responsible 
for  it;  and  finally,  always  and  all  the  time, 
no  matter  how  he  himself  feels,  he  must  be 
agreeable,  obliging,  useful. 

Now  if  the  man  who  has  all  these  bur- 
dens to  bear  is  not  a  camp  dog,  I  should 
like  to  know  what  he  is?  To  those  of  us 
who  have  been  into  the  woods  year  after 
year,  it  is  a  sort  of  boundless  irritation  to 
see  some  members  of  the  camping  party 
sitting  about  idle  while  the  guide  does  the 
work.  Part  of  the  value  of  camp  life  is  its 
activity,  its  activities.  Another  part  of  its 
good  is  the  skill  which  comes  from  learn- 
ing to  be  useful  in  the  woods.  The  life  out- 
of-doors  should  be  a  constant  training  in 
manual  work, — call  it  wood  work  if  you 
wish.  I  am  reminded  of  a  story  told  in 
'Vanity  Fair"  about  a  lazy,  indifferent  stu- 
dent who  was  in  the  class  of  a  famous  physi- 

121 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

cist.  The  freshman  sprawled  in  the  rear 
seat  and  was  sleeping  or  was  about  to  go 
to  sleep. 

"Mr.  Eraser,"  said  the  physicist  sharply, 
"you  may  recite." 

Fraser  opened  his  eyes  but  he  did  not 
change  his  somnolent  pose. 

"Mr.  Fraser,  what  is  work?" 

"Everything  is  work." 

'What,   everything  is  work?" 

"Yes,  sir." 

'Then  I  take  it  you  would  like  the  class 
to  believe  that  this  desk  is  work?" 

'Yes,  sir,"  wearily,  "wood  work." 

From  the  moment  that  school  of  the 
woods  is  entered  every  girl  has  her  wood 
work  cut  out  for  her,  if  she  is  taking  camp- 
ing in  the  right  spirit.  It  is  all  team  play 
in  the  wilderness,  or  if  it  is  not,  it  is  a  rather 
poor  game.  Helpfulness  is  one  of  the  first 
rules  and  every  camper  should  be  willing 
to  help  the  guide.  Usually  the  guides  are  a 

122 


THE  CAMP  DOG 

fine  set  of  self  respecting,  dignified,  resource- 
ful men.  And  I  think  it  might  be  said  with 
considerable  truthfulness  that  when  they  are 
not  what  they  ought  to  be,  it  is  nine  times 
out  of  ten  due  to  the  undesirable  influence 
of  the  parties  they  have  worked  for.  Your 
guide  is  your  equal  in  most  respects  and 
your  superior  in  others.  He  should  be  met 
on  a  footing  of  equality.  I  use  this  word 
advisedly  and  I  do  not  mean  familiarity. 
Well-bred  girls  do  not  meet  anyone,  whether 
in  the  wilderness  or  in  civilization,  on 
this  footing  immediately.  The  party  should 
be  willing  and  glad  to  help  the  guide  in 
every  possible  way.  That  does  not  signify 
doing  his  work  for  him  but  it  does  indicate 
helping  him. 

A  routine  of  some  sort  should  be  adopted 
and  is  one  of  the  best  ways  to  assist  him. 
One  girl  should  be  on  duty  at  one  time  and 
another  at  another  and  all  in  regular  rota- 
tion. No  camp  life  can  go  on  successfully 

J23 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

without  some  law  and  order  of  this  sort.  For 
it  is  just  as  necessary  for  the  smooth  running 
of  household  wheels  in  the  log  cabin  as  it 
is  in  the  city  home.  Whoever  occupies  the 
guide's  position,  that  is  the  one  who  is  chief- 
ly responsible  for  everything,  should  be  ably 
helped  by  the  whole  party  but  not  by  the 
whole  party  at  the  same  time.  Evolve  a 
system  for  the  particular  conditions  of  the 
camp  life  in  which  you  find  yourself  and 
stick  to  it.  Let  one  girl  or  one  set  of  girls 
help  one  day  and  another  the  next.  Let  the 
girl  be  detailed  to  do  one  kind  of  work  one 
day  and  another  another.  This  system, 
with  proper  rotation,  means  that  nobody 
gets  tired  of  her  work.  A  girl  cannot  be 
too  self-reliant  if  she  is  ever  to  be  wise  in 
the  way  of  the  woods.  There  is  no  need 
for  discouragement  if  everything  is  not 
learned  at  once,  for  camping  is  like  skating 
and  is  an  art  to  be  learned  only  through 
many  tumbles  and  mistakes.  Be  prepared 

124 


THE  CAMP  DOG 

to  take  it  and  yourself  lightly — in  short,  to 
laugh  readily  over  the  mistakes  made  in  the 
art  of  living  in  the  woods. 

Now  we  have  come  to  the  very  tip  of  the 
tail  of  the  camp  dog.  You  will  be  interested 
to  know  how  an  old  timer  was  obliged  to 
laugh  at  herself.  I  am  ashamed  to  tell  you 
how  recently  this  occurred.  I  was  in  the 
northernmost  wilderness  of  the  state  of 
Maine,  and  near  a  big  lumber  camp,  when 
I  saw  a  "camp  dog"  lying  on  the  ground, 
its  long  axe  handle  shining  from  use,  its 
pickaxe  blade  a  bright  steel  color,  and  the 
tooth  at  the  back  looking  as  if  it  had  been 
often  used.  I  was  delighted. 

"Oh,"  I  said  to  my  guide,  "look  at  that 
camp  dog  lying  there!" 

He  was  particularly  attentive  to  my  pro- 
nunciation, for  he  said  I  pronounced  some 
words,  such  as  "girl,"  as  he  had  never  heard 
them  pronounced  before.  I  saw  a  curious 
expression  pass  across  his  face. 

125 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

"What  did  you  say  that  was?"  he  asked. 

"Why,   that  camp   dog  lying  there." 

"Camp  dog!"   " 

Then  he  began  to  laugh  and  he  kept  right 
on  until  the  woods  echoed  with  his  roars. 

"Well,"  he  said  finally,  wiping  away  the 
tears,  "if  that  doesn't  beat  everything!  That 
isn't  a  camp  dog,  that's  a  cant  dog, — you 
know  what  you  cant  logs  and  heavy  things 
over  with,  roll  'em  over  and  pry  'em  up  with 
when  you  couldn't  do  it  any  other  way.  My 
grief,  to  think  of  your  calling  that  a  camp 
dog  all  these  years!" 

And  he  went  off  into  another  guffaw. 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE  OUTDOOR  TRAINING  SCHOOL 

MANY  girls  think  of  outdoor  life 
as  of  something  to  be  enjoyed 
if  they  have  plenty  of  time.  As 
a  matter  of  course  they  take  their  daily 
bath.  But  the  outdoor  exercise  comes  as 
an  accessory.  It  is  still  unfortunately  true 
that  boys  more  than  girls  take  camp  life 
for  granted.  Yet  girls,  and  students  particu- 
larly, should  realize  that  it  is  economy  of 
time  to  be  out  of  doors.  This  they  need 
both  for  their  work  and  for  their  health. 
Outdoor  exercise,  with  its  bath  of  fresh  air 
and  the  natural  bath  of  freshly  circulating 
blood  it  brings  with  it,  its  training  school 
for  the  whole  girl,  is  as  essential  as  the  tub 
or  sponge  bath.  But  how  many  of  us  think 
of  it  in  that  way? 

127 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

To  be  outdoors  is  to  have  the  nerves 
keyed  to  the  proper  pitch.  If  fresh  air  is 
not  a  tonic  to  the  nerves,  then  why  is  it 
that  moodiness  and  depression  fall  away  as 
we  walk  or  row  or  lie  under  the  trees,  and 
we  become  saner  and  more  serene?  When 
one  is  depressed  the  best  thing  to  do  is  to 
go  out  of  doors.  Altogether  aside  from 
any  formal  wisdom  of  book  or  student  or 
teacher,  there  is  wisdom  with  nature.  // 
the  head  is  tired,  go  out  of  doors!  If  the 
body  is  fagged,  go  out  of  doors!  If  the 
heart  is  troubled,  go  out  of  doors!  The  life 
out  there,  as  no  life  indoors  can,  will  make 
for  health,  for  charity,  for  bigness.  Petty 
things  fall  away,  and  with  nature  equanim- 
ity and  poise  are  found  again.  It  isn't  neces- 
sary to  bother  someone  about  woes  real  or 
imaginary.  All  that  is  necessary  is  to  get  out 
among  the  trees  and  flowers,  the  sky  and 
clouds,  the  joyous  birds  and  little  creatures 
of  field  and  wood,  and  hear  what  they  have 

128 


THE     OUTDOOR     TRAINING     SCHOOL 

to  say.  There  will  be  no  complaining 
among  them,  even  about  very  real  difficul- 
ties. 

A  great  deal  is  heard  concerning  hygiene 
in  these  days,  the  study  of  it,  the  practice  of 
it.  The  biggest  university  of  hygiene  in  the 
world  is  not  within  houses  but  outside,  up 
that  hillside  where  the  trees  are  blowing,  in 
the  doorway  of  our  tent,  on  the  lawn  in 
front  of  the  house,  out  on  the  lake,  even  on 
a  city  house-top,  and,  last  resort  if  necessary, 
by  an  open  window.  One  reason  why  many 
people  are  concerned  about  this  question  of 
hygiene  is  because  they  know  that  not  only 
are  human  beings  happier  when  they  are 
well  and  strong,  but  also  because  a  healthy 
person  is,  nine  times  out  of  ten,  more  moral 
than  one  who  is  sick  or  sickly.  Ill  health 
means  offense  of  some  kind,  often  one's  own, 
against  the  laws  of  nature  or  society.  We 
have,  too,  to  pay  for  one  another's  faults. 
But  life  lived  on  sound  physical  principles, 

129 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

with  plenty  of  sunshine,  cold  water,  exercise, 
wind,  rain,  simple  food  and  sensible  cloth- 
ing, is  not  likely  to  be  sickly,  useless  or  bur- 
densome. 

The  body  is  not  a  mechanism  to  be  disre- 
garded, but  an  exquisitely  made  machine  to 
be  exquisitely  cared  for.  Nobody  would 
trust  an  engineer  to  run  an  engine  he  knows 
nothing  about.  Yet  most  of  us  are  running 
our  engines  without  any  knowledge  of  the 
machinery.  Why  should  we  excuse  ourselves 
for  lack  of  knowledge  and  care  when,  for 
the  same  reasons  a  chauffeur,  for  example, 
would  be  immediately  dismissed?  How 
many  of  us  know  that  the  nerves  are  more 
or  less  dependent  upon  the  muscles  for  their 
tone?  How  many  of  us  realize  how  im- 
portant it  is  to  keep  in  perfect  muscular 
condition?  We  sit  hour  after  hour  in  our 
chairs,  all  our  muscles  relaxed,  bending  over 
books,  and  begrudge  one  hour — it  ought  to 
be  three  or  four! — out  of  doors.  The  per- 

130 


JLOON 


PARTRIDGE: 


^ED-BREASTED    MERGANSER 


&>^\\/£3&r:.->v>?y? 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR    GIRLS 

son  who  can  run  furthest  and  swiftest  is  the 
one  with  the  strongest  heart.  The  person 
who  can  work  longest  and  to  the  greatest  ad- 
vantage is  the  one  who  has  kept  his  bodily 
health.  .  .It  may  be  laid  down  as  an  absolute 
ride  that  any  individual  can  do  more  and 
better  work  when  he  is  well  than  when  he  is 
not  in  good  physical  condition.  Ceaseless  ac- 
tivity is  the  law  of  nature  and  the  body  that 
is  resolutely  active  does  not  grow  old  as 
rapidly  as  the  one  that  is  physically  indolent. 
Much  out-of-door  life,  much  camping, 
keep  one  young  in  heart,  too.  It  isn't  pos- 
sible to  grow  old  or  sophisticated  among 
such  a  wealth  of  joyous,  wholesome  friend- 
ships as  may  be  found  in  nature,  where  no 
unclean  word  is  ever  heard  and  where  no 
unfriendliness,  no  false  pride,  no  jealousy 
can  exist.  A  great  English  poet,  William 
Wordsworth,  has  told  us  more  of  the  shap- 
ing power  of  nature,  its  quickening  spirit, 
its  power  of  restoration,  than  any  other 

132 


THE     OUTDOOR     TRAINING     SCHOOL 

poet.  It  would  be  well  for  every  girl  to  take 
that  wonderful  poem  'Tintern  Abbey"  out 
of  doors  and  read  it  there.  Wordsworth, 
still  a  very  young  man  when  he  wrote  it, 
tells  how  he  loved  the  Welsh  landscape  and 
the  tranquil  restoration  it  had  brought  him 


"mid  the  din 
Of  towns  and  cities." 


A  higher  gift  he  acknowledges,  too,  when 
through  the  harmony  and  joy  of  nature  he 
had  been  led  to  see  deeply  "into  the  life  of 
things." 

There  is  something  the  matter  with  a  girl 
who  hasn't  an  appetite,  as  sharp  as  hunger, 
to  escape  from  her  books  and  camp  out  of 
doors.  If  outdoor  life  cannot  engross  her 
wholly  at  times,  banishing  all  thoughts  of 
work,  then  she  should  make  an  effort  to 
forget  books  and  everything  connected  with 
them  for  a  while.  A  young  girl  ought  to  be 
skillful  in  all  sorts  of  outdoor  accomplish- 
es 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

ments,  rowing,  swimming,  riding  and  driv- 
ing if  possible,  canoeing,  skating,  sailing  a 
boat,  fishing,  hunting,  mountain  climbing. 

Fortunately  there  is  more  of  the  play- 
spirit  connected  with  outdoor  life  than  there 
used  to  be.  Both  school  and  college  have 
fostered  this  wholesome  attitude.  If  a  girl 
doesn't  like  active  sports  she  should  culti- 
vate a  love  for  them.  You  can  always  trust 
a  person  who  is  accomplished  in  physical 
ways,  for  anyone  who  has  led  an  intelligent 
out-of-door  life  is  more  self-reliant.  Her 
faculty  for  doing  things,  her  inventiveness, 
her  poise,  her  "nerve"  are  all  strengthened. 
I  recall  an  instance  of  this  "faculty"  and  in- 
ventiveness. We  were  on  a  wild  Maine  lake 
when  an  accident  happened  to  the  canoe,  a 
necessity  to  our  return,  for  we  were  far 
away  from  all  sources  of  help.  Apparently 
there  was  nothing  with  which  to  mend  it. 
But  our  Indian  guide  found  there  everything 
he  needed  ready  for  his  use.  He  scraped 


SONG    SPARROW 
GOLDEN- CROWNED     THRUSH  CHIPPING     SPAP/ROW 


'.WOOD 
THRUSH 


HERMIT 

THRUSH 


SWAINSON'S     WILSON'S 
THRUSH  THT?USH 


PHCEBE  BIRD        SCAKLET 

TANAGER 


MARYLAND 
YELLOWTHROAT 


BLUEBIRD 


•WHIP-  POOR-WlLl- 


NIGHT    HAWK 
135 


SCREETCH      OWL 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

gum  off  a  tree,  he  cut  a  piece  of  bark,  and 
then  he  rummaged  about  until  he  discovered 
an  old  wire.  With  these  things  he  securely 
mended  a  big  hole.  Oftentimes  it  seems  as 
if  the  very  appliances  with  which  city  child- 
ren are  provided  tend  to  make  them  inca- 
pable. 

The  girl  who  lives  out  of  doors  acquires 
unlimited  resourcefulness.  Outdoor  life 
quickens  and  sharpens  the  perception.  And 
for  the  girl  to  have  her  power  of  observa- 
tion sharpened  is  worth  a  great  deal.  The 
capacity  for  accurate  and  quick  observation 
education  from  books  does  not  always  de- 
velop. One  must  go  back  to  nature  for 
that,  one  must  live  out  in  the  woods  and 
fields  all  one  can,  one  must  be  able 
to  tell  the  scent  of  honeysuckle  from 
the  scent  of  the  rose,  and  know  the 
fragrance  of  milkweed  even  before  that 
homely  weed  is  seen,  and  know  spruce,  bal- 
sam and  white  pine  even  as  one  knows  a 

136 


B^I^WSS? 

<! 
HORSE  CHE5TNUT 


CHESTNUT 


MOUNTAIN     IMAPLE 


137 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

friend.  Eyes  must  be  able  to  detect  the  dif- 
ferences not  only  in  colors  and  shapes  of 
birds,  but  in  their  flight,  and  ears  know 
every  song  of  wood  and  field.  Then  the 
services  of  beauty,  its  music,  its  color,  its 
form,  will  be  always  about  us  and  nature's 
health  and  strength  and  beauty  become  our 
own,  not  only  her  gaiety  and  "vital  feelings 
of  delight,"  but  also  her  restraint  upon 
weakness,  and  her  kindling  to  the  highest 
life — the  life  that  is  spiritual. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

THE  CAMP   HABIT 

IF  there  were  no   such  thing  as  habit, 
life  would  be  nothing  but  a  perpetual 
beginning    and    recommencing    over 
and  over  again.     All  that  we  do  or  think 
marks  us  with  its  imprint,  leaving  behind  it  a 
tendency- -a  tendency  towards   repetition  is 
the  beginning  of  habit,  and  because  of  it  we 
can  get  the  camp  habit  just  as  we  can  get  any 
other    habit.      The    instinct    to    repeat    our 
camping    out     of    doors     gradually    grows 
stronger.     At  last,  scarcely  conscious  of  the 
existence  of  the  demand,  we  have  come  to 
feel  that  we  cannot  pass  our  holiday  in  any 
other  way.      The   first   camping   experience 
stands  out  in  bold  relief  because  it  is  new. 
As  we  live  into  it,  its  first  impressions  are 
lost.     And  it  is  at  this  moment,  if  we  are 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

made  of  the  right  stuff  and  have  in  us  the 
right  longings  and  needs,  that  we  begin  to 
have  the  camp  habit. 

Just  as  with  people,  maybe  we  scarcely 
realize  how  much  it  means  to  us.  But  let 
us  stop  to  think  about  it,  let  us  give  this 
good  camp  habit  a  full  opportunity  if  we  can 
in  our  lives.  Already  the  camp  habit  has 
become  a  need,  almost  an  imperious  de- 
mand. We  feel  that  once  in  so  often  it  must 
be  satisfied  and  in  the  splendid  grip  of  this 
good  habit  we  make  way  for  it.  Never  let 
us  become  dull  to  any  of  its  values.  Never 
let  us  forget,  however  shot  with  black  and 
white  it  may  be,  even  gray  at  times,  the  dif- 
ficulties of  camping  may  make  life  seem — 
never  let  us  forget  the  treasures  that  it  pours 
in  upon  us  and  the  ways  in  which  the  camp 
habit  serves  us. 

It  is  a  sad  and  a  great  truth  which  per- 
haps women  and  girls  have  not  yet  fully 
realized,  that  the  whole  manner  of  our  body, 

140 


THE  CAMP  HABIT 

of  our  souls  is  controlled  by  the  goodness,  or 
the  badness  of  our  habits,  our  moral  char- 
acter, our  physical  temperament.  There  is 
a  sort  of  natural  medicine,  raising  what  is 
not  good  inevitably  up  to  what  is  better. 
That  is  what  the  camp  habit  does  for  us, 
raising  what  is  not  healthy,  not  strong,  not 
sane,  not  joyous,  not  self-reliant  up  to  what 
is  strong,  healthy,  joyous  and  full  of  self- 
control.  Is  not  this  alone  sufficient  reason 
for  giving  the  camp  habit  once  in  so 
often  full  sway  in  our  lives?  What  better 
could  we  do  than,  in  order  to  re-establish 
ourselves,  to  claim  again  the  wise  big  rela- 
tionships of  out-of-doors  and  a  thousand 
and  one  little  and  big  friends  whom  we  can 
find  there? 

Bad  habits  are  thieves,  for  they  take  away 
our  energies,  our  abilities,  our  joys.  And  the 
indoor  habit  is  a  thief.  It  shortens  life,  it 
takes  away  from  health,  it  saps  energies,  it 
dilutes  joys,  it  makes  foggy  heads  and 

141 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

punky  morals.  The  sane  girl  will  get  out 
of  doors  every  opportunity  instead  of  spend- 
ing her  time  in  a  hot  room,  playing  cards, 
or  eating  stuff  that  is  not  fit  to  put  into  the 
human  stomach  or  flirting  with  boys,  who  if 
they  are  the  right  sort  of  boys,  would  much 
prefer,  too,  to  be  out  of  doors.  Good  hab- 
its, like  this  camp  habit  are  benefactors, 
great  philanthropists;  they  strengthen  us 
and  they  give  us  more  energy.  They  in- 
crease our  ability,  they  multiply  our  joys 
compound  interest-wise.  Good  habits  are 
careful  accountants  and  every  day  or  every 
year  as  it  may  be,  they  put  the  interest  of 
strength,  of  intelligence,  of  joy,  in  our  hands 
to  be  used  as  we  think  best.  The  camp  habit 
wisely  used,  obliges  us  to  open  our  eyes  and 
see  life  more  truly.  It  obliges  us  to  lift  our 
own  weight,  take  our  part  in  things,  that  part 
may  be  washing  dishes  or  it  may  be  turning 
griddle  cakes, — it  forces  us  to  know  our- 
selves better  and  it  gives  us  more  power  to 

142 


THE  CAMP  HABIT 

control  ourselves.  The  camp  habit — get  it 
quickly  if  you  haven't  it  already — assures  us 
of  good  health  and  success  where,  for  ex- 
ample, the  indoor  habit  has  brought  us  noth- 
ing but  ill  health  and  failure.  It  is  a  habit 
worth  while  getting,  isn't  it? 

A  good  many  of  us  know  ourselves,  such 
as  we  are,  pretty  well  and  we  feel  that  we 
do  not  want  to  know  ourselves  any  better. 
Things  are  bad  enough  as  they  are.  Yet  if 
we  can't  have  a  more  intimate  knowledge  of 
ourselves,  if  we  don't  arrange  our  lives  bet- 
ter, if  we  don't  plan  for  the  future  more 
carefully,  what  are  our  lives  likely  to  be  like 
when  the  curtain  goes  down?  How  are  we 
ever  going  to  take  the  proverbial  ounce  of 
prevention  if  we  are  not  certain  to  a  frac- 
tion what  it  is  we  must  prevent?  Camp  is 
a  splendid  opportunity  to  think  a  little  about 
those  things  of  which  we  have  been  afraid 
to  think.  It  is  a  good  opportunity  to  medi- 
tate, a  friendly  world  to  which  to  go  to 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

know  ourselves  better.  It  is  an  old  saying 
that  the  first  step  towards  the  recovery  of 
health  is  to  know  yourself  ill.  In  that  great 
out-of-door  world  which  our  American  camp 
life  represents  it  is  easier  to  find  ourselves 
morally  than  it  is  indoors,  we  get  more 
help  for  one  thing.  It  is  almost  an  instinct 
in  great  trouble  or  bewilderment  or  difficulty 
to  escape  into  the  out-of-door  world,  to  get 
back  to  earth  and  to  ask  from  the  great 
mother  those  counsels  we  hear  dimly  or  in- 
differently indoors. 

Wisdom  will  not  be  found  in  one  camp 
holiday  or  in  fifty  or  in  a  lifetime  even.  But 
it  is  rather  strange,  isn't  it,  that  the  person 
whom  we  know  least  is  so  frequently  our- 
selves? We  know  very  well  that  the  most 
learned  man  or  woman  is  not  the  one  whose 
head  is  stuffed  with  information,  is  not  neces- 
sarily the  conspicuous  or  famous  man  or 
woman,  but  is,  rather,  the  human  being  who 
knows  himself.  And  this  human  being  may 

H4 


THE  CAMP  HABIT 

be  not  our  teacher,  but  our  janitor  or  a 
nurse  who  takes  care  of  the  baby  or  that 
fellow  who  seems  so  simple,  the  guide  who 
has  our  camping  trip  in  charge.  Indeed, 
there  is  scarcely  a  class  of  men  who  seem 
in  better  control  of  themselves  and  who  have 
a  better  working  knowledge  of  themselves 
and  others  than  the  highest  type  of  guide. 
All  the  associations  of  that  great  out-of-door 
life,  its  demands,  its  privations,  its  sudden 
needs,  its  great  silence,  its  dumb  creatures, 
its  wonderful  beauty,  have  taught  the  man  of 
the  woods  a  wisdom  no  school,  no  university, 
can  offer  merely  through  its  curriculum.  We 
can't  realize  too  early  how  well  worth  while 
that  wisdom  is  for  every  girl  to  have.  Not 
a  thing  of  book  learning,  but  a  power  that 
makes  one  truthful  with  oneself,  eager  to 
acknowledge  what  is  bad  and  to  change  it. 
Frank,  courageous,  tried  in  commonplace 
wisdom,  and  with  a  knowledge  of  other  hu- 
man beings. 

H5 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

There  is  one  kind  of  idea — and  it  is  worth 
while  meditating  in  the  woods  on  the  lever- 
age power  of  even  one  very  little  idea — that 
can  always  be  found  out  of  doors.  I  mean 
a  healthful  idea,  the  kind  of  thought  that 
makes  us  stand  straighter,  that  strengthens 
the  muscles  of  our  backbone,  that  makes  us 
act  as  if  we  were  what  we  wish  to  be.  There 
is  no  other  force  in  the  world  that  can  so 
readily  straighten  out  a  crooked  boy  or 
a  crooked  girl  as  this  same  Dr.  Dame  Nature. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

OTHER  CLEANLINESS 

CLEAN?  Of  course,  we  all  know 
what  cleanliness  means.  It  is 
not  possible  to  drive,  to  ride  in 
a  trolley,  to  go  on  a  train  without 
being  impressed  with  at  least  the  advertis- 
ing energy  that  is  put  into  trying  to  get  or 
keep  the  world  clean.  Dear  me,  there  are 
the  ever-present,  cheerful  Gold  Dust  Twins, 
well  up  with  the  times,  you  may  believe, 
and  nowadays  taking  to  aviation.  Their 
aeroplanes  may  not  be  very  large,  but 
they  are  clean  as  gold  dust  can  make  them, 
and  the  twins,  without  any  of  the  friction 
that  comes  from  dirt,  are  flying  at  last. 
What's  more,  intrepid  as  some  old  Forty- 
Niner,  they  are  penetrating  the  camper's 
wilderness.  Most  of  us  do  not  want  to  be 

H7 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

twins,  and  we  certainly  do  not  want  to  be 
gold  dusters  or  any  other  kind  of  dusters, 
yet  we  should  miss  these  jolly  little  young- 
sters. And  there  are  Sapolio  and  Sunny 
Monday  advertisements  and  Pears'  soap- 
have  you  used  it? — and  a  dozen  other  kinds 
and  goodness  knows  what  not  besides. 

Yes,  we  Americans,  and  especially  Ameri- 
can women  in  the  household,  know  what  it 
is  to  make  an  effort  in  the  midst  of  heated, 
dusty  or  uncared  for  streets  to  keep  our 
houses  and  everything  in  them  clean.  In 
Pennsylvania  you  see  the  people  scrubbing 
off  white  marble  steps.  In  New  England 
they  turn  the  hose  on  the  outside  of  their 
white  farm  houses.  In  the  West  they  flood 
the  side-walks  to  keep  the  dust  and  heat 
down.  And  our  houses?  Well,  all  houses 
are  being  built  with  bath  tubs  nowadays, 
even  our  camps,  which  is  more  than  can  be 
said  for  very  good  houses  indeed  in  other 
countries  than  America.  Some  people  think 

148 


OTHER  CLEANLINESS 

that  camping  is  an  excuse  to  be  dirty.  Often 
they  are  very  nice  people,  too,  but  they  keep 
a  dirty  camp.  They  don't  keep  even  them- 
selves clean. 

But  there  is  another  kind  of  cleanliness, 
not  superficial,  not  that  of  the  skin,  or  of  the 
clothes  or  of  the  cabin,  about  which  we  are 
coming  to  think  more  and  more  deeply.  It 
is  what  might  be  called  vital  cleanliness,  the 
cleanness  of  stomachs,  of  the  intestines,  of 
all  the  vital  organs.  We  begin  to  realize 
the  truth  of  what  those  most  helpful  of  mis- 
sionaries, the  health  culturists,  are  saying: 
One  may  be  clean  superficially,  that  is  one 
may  scrub  enough  and  yet  vitally  be  very 
far  from  clean.  We  know,  although  it  is  of 
the  greatest  assistance  to  keep  the  skin  free 
and  vigorous  so  that  it  is  able  to  do  its  part 
of  the  house-cleaning  work  for  our  systems, 
that  vital  cleanliness,  clean,  strong,  in- 
ternal organs  performing  their  work  with 
the  vigor  of  well-constructed  engines,  unin- 

149 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

jured  by  foolish  clothing,  unharmed  by  im- 
pure food,  keen  for  opportunity  to  grow 
and  be  vigorous — we  know,  I  say  that  that 
cleanliness  is  more  important  than  skin  clean- 
liness. Indeed,  without  such  deep-seated 
cleanliness  it  is  impossible  for  the  skin  to  be 
really  clean. 

But  clean  how?  I  wonder  whether  we 
are  clean  in  the  way  I  mean.  Yes,  we 
are  clean  in  our  houses,  perhaps  in  our 
camps,  clean  on  the  outsides  of  our  bodies, 
clean  probably,  on  the  inside.  Yet  no  one 
of  these  kinds  of  cleanliness  is  what  I  have 
in  mind.  Can  any  girl  by  the  camp  fire 
guess  what  it  is?  I  will  not  say  it  is  more 
important  than  household  cleanliness,  al- 
though it  is  so, — vastly  more  so.  I  will  not 
say  that  it  is  more  important  than  bodily 
cleanliness,  external  and  internal,  yet  it  is  so, 
— vastly  more  so.  I  could  almost  say  that 
it  is  more  important  than  anything  else  in 
the  world  of  human  experience.  Do  you 

150 


OTHER  CLEANLINESS 

know  what  it  is  now?  It  is  cleanness  of  the 
mind,  cleanness  of  the  soul,  and  of  that  kind 
of  purity  the  great  outdoor  world  is  one  in- 
divisible whole. 

On  this  cleanliness  of  mind  and  soul  all 
the  vital  activities  of  the  day  depend,  all  the 
growth,  the  gain,  the  development.  It  might 
be  well  said  that  the  way  we  take  up  the 
sun  into  our  bodies — and  we  could  not  live 
any  length  of  time  without  some  sun — de- 
pends upon  the  cleanness  or  uncleanness  of 
this  mind  and  soul  of  ours.  What  we  shall 
eat,  what  we  shall  hear,  what  we  shall  see, 
what  we  shall  look  forward  to,  what  we 
shall  care  for- -all  these  things  will  be  ac- 
cording to  laws  as  inevitable  as  those  gov- 
erning the  sun  and  moon  and  stars,  valuable 
or  worthless,  vicious  or  sacred,  as  we  feel 
them  and  we  make  them.  We  dip  our  fin- 
gers in  pitch  and  pick  up  a  book.  What  is 
the  result?  Any  child  could  tell  us  that  we 
ruin  the  book  with  our  pitch-covered  fin- 

151 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

* 

gers.  We  dip  our  minds  into  filth,  a  nasty 
story,  a  perverted  way  of  looking  at  things 
which  in  themselves  are  good  and  of  God's 
plan,  or  we  actually  commit  some  ugly  act 
ourselves  and  then  we  go  out  into  the  pres- 
ence of  those  things  which  are  clean,  the 
sunshine,  the  hills,  the  lakes,  the  woods,  the 
white  lives  of  others,  the  ideals  which,  it 
may  be,  have  been  ours.  Do  you  suppose 
we  feel  or  see  that  sunshine,  or  that  we  are 
aware  any  longer  of  the  white  lives  of 
others,  that  our  past  ideals  are  evident  to 
us  when  our  hearts  and  minds  are  no  longer 
clean?  Do  you  suppose  that  there  is  any- 
thing in  nature  which  comes  home  to  us  in 
quite  the  beautiful  way  it  once  did,  the 
flowers,  the  birds,  the  song  of  the  wind,  the 
little  creatures  of  the  wood?  Can  they  ever 
be  entirely  the  same?  No,  by  an  inevitable 
law  of  compensations  some  of  the  fullness 
of  our  joy  in  these  things  is  gone.  If  we 
want  to  be  really  happy  it  does  not  pay 

152 


OTHER  CLEANLINESS 

to   think   evil,   to   touch   evil   or   to   commit 
it. 

When  our  hands  are  dirty  we  know  it, 
and  if  we  have  been  careless  about  them  we 
are  ashamed.  If  people's  bodies  or  camps 
are  not  clean  it  is  painfully  easy  to  know 
that,  too.  But  a  dirty  mind,  who  could  ever 
tell  anyway  that  we  had  one?  Who  could 
ever  tell?  I  will  tell  you:  Every  one  knows 
it,  or  perhaps,  better,  every  one  feels  it.  If 
we  are  not  good,  if  our  minds  are  not  clean, 
our  presence  in  some  mysterious  way  pro- 
claims that  fact.  If  we  have  injured  some 
one,  if  we  have  been  foul-tongued,  others 
will  know  it  with  no  need  for  any  one  to 
tell  them.  Even  the  little  rabbit  we  meet  in 
the  woods  will  not  greet  us  in  so  friendly  a 
way.  We  need  not  think  that  because  we 
are  concealing  a  bad  thought  that  it  is  there- 
fore hidden.  No,  indeed,  it  is  screaming 
away  like  some  ugly  black  crow  on  a  spruce 
tip,  and  there  is  no  one  within  hearing  dis- 

153 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

tance  who,   whether  he  wishes  to   or  not, 
does  not  hear  what  it  says. 

The  mind  has  its  plague  spots  even  as  the 
body,  and  one  has  to  work — because  of 
one's  environment  or  some  inheritance  which 
has  made  us  not  quite  wholesome  by  na- 
ture, or  because  of  friends  whose  feelings 
one  would  not  injure,  and  yet  who  are  not 
what  they  ought  to  be, — one  has  often  to 
work  to  keep  the  mind  clean.  But  as  you 
would  flee  from  the  plague,  run  from  a  dirty 
story.  Don't  let  the  camp  life  be  spoiled 
by  anything  to  be  regretted!  Do  not  let 
any  one  touch  you  with  it,  even  with  a  word 
of  it.  Keep  a  thousand  miles  away  if  you 
can  from  folk  who  have  an  impure  way  of 
looking  at  life,  and  camp  is  a  good  place  to 
get  away  from  such  people.  Shut  your 
minds  against  them.  One  is  never  called 
upon  on  the  score  of  duty  to  have  an  unclean 
mind  because  others  have  it.  And  if  through 
some  misfortune,  something  that  is  unlovely, 

154 


OTHER  CLEANLINESS 

unclean,  has  been  impressed  upon  you,  fight 
valiantly  not  to  think  of  it,  to  put  it  away 
from  you.  And  never  forget  that  to  rule 
our  spirits,  to  be  in  command  of  our  minds, 
to  have  them  wholesome  and  sweet  and 
clean  as  a  freshly  swept  log  cabin,  is  greater 
than  to  win  such  victories  as  have  come  down 
in  the  records  of  history. 

I  remember  that  when  I  was  a  child,  I 
thought  my  heart  was  white  and  that  every 
time  I  said  or  thought  anything  naughty,  I 
got  a  black  spot  on  its  surface.  I  dare  say 
that  in  the  first  place  some  dear  old  negro 
woman  put  this  fable  into  my  mind.  And, 
dear  me,  some  days  it  seemed  to  me  that 
heart  of  mine  was  more  spotted  than  any 
tiger  lily  that  ever  grew  in  any  neglected 
garden.  Perhaps  it  was  foolish  to  think  such 
a  thing.  I  do  not  know,  I  only  know  that 
there  were  times  when  I  was  mighty  careful 
of  that  white  heart  of  mine, — wrapping  it 
up  in  a  pocket  handkerchief  would  not  have 

155 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

satisfied  my  eagerness  to  keep  it  clean.  And 
what  better  could  one  wish  than  to  go  on 
one's  holiday,  and  on  forever,  with  the  white 
shining  heart  of  a  child? 


CHAPTER  XV 

WOOD  CULTURE  AND  CAMP   HEALTH 

i 

IT  \s  far  better  for  the  girl  to  be  out  in  a 
wilderness  world  which  demands  all 
the  attention  of  both  heart  and  mind, 
than  to  be  leading  an  idle  or  sedentary  life 
at  home.  If  there  is  one  word  which  above 
all  others  expresses  the  life  of  the  woods,  it 
is  the  word  WHOLESOME.  It  is  a  normal, 
active,  "hard-pan"  life  which  takes  the  soft- 
ness not  only  out  of  the  muscles,  but  also 
out  of  the  thoughts  and  the  feelings.  It 
tightens  up  the  tendons  of  our  bodies  and 
the  even  more  wonderful  tendons  of  the 
mind. 

Often,  to  paraphrase  Guts  Muths,  a  girl 
is  weak  because  it  does  not  occur  to  her  that 
she  can  be  strong.  She  fails  to  lay  the 
foundations  of  health  and  strength  which 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

should  be  laid;  she  fails  to  make  the  most  of 
the  energy  that  she  has;  she  fails  to  think 
of  the  future  and  how  important  in  every 
way  it  is  that  she  should  be  robust  and  full 
of  an  abounding  vitality.  It  is  a  matter  of 
the  greatest  importance  to  the  world  spirit- 
ually, morally,  physically,  that  its  girls 
should  be  strong.  To  be  out  of  doors  in- 
sures abundant  well-being  as  nothing  else 
can.  The  wilderness  instinct,  the  instinct 
for  camping  and  all  its  out-of-door  life  and 
sports,  is  the  healthiest,  sanest,  and  most 
compound-interest-paying  investment  a  girl 
can  make. 

But  by  an  intelligent  approach  to  this  life, 
more  can  be  put  into  it  and  therefore  more 
can  be  taken  out,  than  by  some  blindfolded 
dive  into  its  mysteries.  To  know  how  to 
do  a  thing  worth  doing  and  to  do  it  well,  is 
both  wise  and  economical.  Some  of  the 
physical  aspects  of  our  life  will  give  all  the 
more  value  because  of  the  payment  of  an 

158 


WOOD  CULTURE  AND  CAMP   HEALTH 

added  attention.  A  few  simple  rules  for 
the  physical  side  of  camp  life  will  do  quite 
as  much  for  the  body  as  an  orderly  routine 
can  do  for  the  camp  housekeeping. 

Simply  because  you  are  in  camp,  never  do 
anything  by  eating  or  drinking  or  over-strain 
or  folly  of  any  sort,  that  is  against  the  law 
of  health.  To  break  the  laws  of  health  is 
as  much  a  sin  in  camp  as  out  of  it. 

Eat  an  abundance  of  simple,  wholesome 
foods,  using  as  much  cereals,  fruits,  and 
vegetables  as  you  can  get.  Don't  neglect 
the  care  of  your  teeth  merely  because  you 
are  in  camp. 

Do  not  drink  tea  or  coffee.  Stimulants 
are  unnatural  and  unwholesome;  no  girl  and 
no  woman  should  ever  touch  them.  If  you 
have  begun  to  drink  tea  and  coffee,  camp  is 
the  place  to  give  them  up  once  and  for  all 
time.  The  sooner  the  better. 

If  you  can  get  a  cool  bath  in  stream  or 
pond  and  a  rub  down  with  a  rough  towel, 

159 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR    GIRLS 

so  much  the  better.  Exercise  both  before 
and  after  the  bath,  and  be  sure,  by  rub  down 
and  exercise,  to  get  into  a  good  glow.  The 
rub  down  is  of  especial  importance,  for  it 
stimulates  all  the  tiny  surface  veins,  is  gym- 
nastics to  the  skin,  and  frees  the  pores  of  any 
poisonous  accumulations  which  they  may  be 
holding.  Drink  a  glass  or  two  of  pure 
water  when  you  get  up  and  the  same  be- 
tween meals. 

Never  wear  anything  tight  in  camp  or 
elsewhere.  Within  the  circle  of  the  waist 
line  are  vital  organs  which  need  every  deep 
breath  you  can  take,  every  ounce  of  freely 
flowing  blood  you  can  bring  to  them,  every 
particle  of  room  to  grow  you  can  give  them. 
The  Chinese  woman  who  cramps  her  feet 
sins  less  than  we  who  cramp  our  waists. 

Sleep  ten  or  eleven  hours  every  night. 

Study  to  make  your  body  well,  strong, 
and  useful. 

If  you  do  all  these  things,  you  need  not 

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WOOD  CULTURE  AND  CAMP  HEALTH 

worry  about  beauty;  you  will  possess  what 
is  of  infinitely  more  value  than  a  pretty  face 
and  abundant  hair,  in  having  a  sound,  whole- 
some body,  self-controlled,  instinct  with  joy, 
with  clean,  glowing  skin,  a  pleasure  to  your- 
self and  to  everybody  else.  Clear  vital 
thoughts  and  a  keener  spiritual  life  will  both 
be  yours.  Because  of  the  days  in  the  woods 
it  will  be  easier  to  be  good,  easier  to  be 
happy,  easier  to  do  the  brain  work  of  school 
and  college. 

Part  of  the  title  of  this  chapter  is  Wood 
Culture.  I  have  something  in  mind  that  is 
more  than  physical  culture:  The  wilderness 
cure,  the  lesson  of  the  woods,  a  high  spirit- 
ual as  well  as  physical  truth.  For  the  girl 
who  keeps  her  eyes  open,  here  are  forces  at 
work,  mysterious,  inspiring,  wonderful,  that 
awake  in  her  all  the  dormant  worship  and 
vision  of  her  nature.  Yet  of  physical  cul- 
ture in  these  weeks  and  days  in  the  woods 
too  much  cannot  be  said,  for,  as  the  world 

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VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

is  beginning  to  realize,  on  one's  physical 
health,  cleanness,  sanity,  rests  much  of  that 
close-builded  wonderful  palace  of  mind  and 
soul.  Every  squad  of  girl  campers  should 
have  its  physical  culture  drill,  its  definite  ex- 
ercises, taken  at  a  definite  time,  for  ten  or 
fifteen  minutes.  Ten  or  fifteen  minutes  are 
probably  all  that  are  necessary  when  prac- 
tically the  remainder  of  the  day  is  spent  in 
camp  sports,  canoeing,  fishing,  climbing, 
hunting  and  so  on.  The  object  of  these 
physical  exercises  should  be  all-around  de- 
velopment; the  drill  should  be  sharp  and 
light  with  especial  attention  paid  to  breath- 
ing and  to  the  standing  position.  A  steady 
unflagging  effort  should  be  made  to  correct 
round  shoulders,  flat  chests,  drooping  necks, 
and  bad  positions  generally.  Many  and 
varied  are  the  exercises  taught  in  school  and 
college, — exercises  to  which  all  girls  have  ac- 
cess. I  make  no  apologies  for  suggesting 
a  few  of  the  simplest  by  means  of  which  any 

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WOOD  CULTURE  AND  CAMP  HEALTH 

squad  of  girl  campers  can  make  a  beginning 
in  physical  culture. 

(i)  From  attention  (hands  on  hips), 
place  the  palms  of  the  hands  flat  on  the 
ground,  keeping  knees  straight.  Then 
bring  arms  up  above  head.  Do  this  eight 
times.  (2)  With  hands  on  the  hips  and  the 
hips  as  a  socket,  rotate  the  whole  trunk  first 
five  times  in  one  direction,  then  five  times 
in  the  opposite,  being  sure  that  the  head  fol- 
lows the  line  of  the  rotating  trunk.  The 
difficulty  of  this  exercise  can  be  increased  by 
placing  hands  clasped  behind  the  head,  and 
then  later  over  the  head.  But  the  exercise 
should  be  undertaken  first  with  the  hands  on 
the  hips. 

(3)  In  between  each  exercise  take  deep 
breathing  for  a  few  seconds,  rising  on  the 
toes  as  you  inhale  and  lowering  as  you  ex- 
hale. 

(4)  Stand  with  the  feet  apart  and  arms 
horizontal.         Without    bending    the    knee 

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VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

place  the  right  fist  on  the  ground  next  to 
the  instep  of  your  left  foot.  Then  raise 
the  body  and  reverse,  placing  the  left  fist 
on  the  ground  next  to  the  right  instep. 

(5)  After  this  some  free  exercises  with 
the  arms,  taken  with  the  head  well  up,  chest 
out,  and  shoulders  back,  make  a  good,  sharp 
light  finale. 

These  exercises  repeated  several  times 
make  an  excellent  beginning  for  any  day, 
either  in  or  out  of  camp.  You  may  unfor- 
tunately be  going  through  a  state  of  mind, 
when  clean  skin,  good  lungs  and  digestion, 
seem  to  you  negligible  factors  in  life.  How 
tragically  important  these  factors  are,  be 
sure  you  do  not  realize  too  late,  when  both 
body  and  soul,  health  and  morals,  have 
been  undermined. 

Most  girls  need  to  look  upon  camp  life 
as  an  incomparably  rich  opportunity  to  gain 
in  an  all-round  physical  development.  The 
life  itself,  aside  from  its  possible  physical 

164 


WOOD  CULTURE  AND  CAMP  HEALTH 

culture  exercises  and  its  sports  of  rowing, 
paddling,  swimming,  climbing  and  walking, 
is  the  big  architect  of  a  splendid  substruc- 
ture for  health.  By  taking  thought,  refus- 
ing to  eat  greasy,  unwholesome  food,  get- 
ting plenty  of  sleep,  avoiding  over-strain, 
taking  corrective  exercises,  cool  baths  and 
rub  downs,  there  is  no  better  health  builder 
than  the  wilderness  life.  A  wise  Danish 
man  said  that  "He  who  does  not  take  care 
of  his  body,  neglects  it,  and  thereby  sins 
against  nature;  she  knows  no  forgiveness  of 
sin,  but  revenges  herself  with  mathematical 
certainty."  In  the  woods  nature  keeps  re- 
minding you  of  this  fact,  and  you  are  never 
allowed  to  forget  it  for  any  length  of  time. 
It  is  only  sensible  to  care  for  one's  health. 
It  is  not  necessarily  old  maidish  or  silly  to 
take  precautions  that  the  camp  health 
should  be  at  its  zenith  all  the  time.  No 
one  would  think  of  criticising  a  man  for  be- 
ing particularly  careful  of  his  horses  under 

165 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

new  conditions.  This  is  precisely  what  we 
should  be  for  ourselves.  Your  thorough- 
paced sportsman  is  always  regardful  of  his 
physical  condition.  I  have  spoken  about  the 
drinking  of  pure  water,  the  care  of  food, 
the  folly  of  taking  great  risks,  and  of  other 
details.  There  are  more  factors,  as  well, 
which  will  be  at  work  in  obtaining  and  main- 
taining good  health  conditions. 

The  right  sort  of  underclothing — and 
women  seldom  wear  suitable  underwear — 
should  be  worn.  It  should  be  high  necked, 
with  shoulder  caps  and  knee  caps,  and  should 
be  of  linen  mesh.  Every  girl  who  is  in  fit 
condition  should  see  that  each  day  has  a 
brief  period  at  least  of  hard,  warm,  strenu- 
ous work  in  it.  A  sweat  once  a  day,  with 
a  proper  rub  down  afterwards,  is  one  of  the 
best  health  makers  on  record.  In  "By  the 
sweat  of  thy  brow  shalt  thou  labor"  was 
enunciated  one  of  the  greatest  of  natural 
laws.  If  it  were  possible  for  each  one  of 

1 66 


WOOD  CULTURE  AND  CAMP  HEALTH 

us  to  sweat  once  a  day,  we  should  scarcely 
ever  know  what  sickness  is.  But  our  over- 
refined  civilization  makes  even  the  use  of  the 
word  an  offence  to  certain  middle  class 
people  who  care  more  for  the  so-called  pro- 
priety (they  are  the  folk  who  say  "soiled" 
handkerchief  instead  of  dirty,  and  "stom- 
ach" when  they  mean  belly,  and  yet  are 
ready  to  use  such  a  detestably  vulgar  word, 
straight  out  of  the  mouths  of  the  lowest 
classes  of  immigrants,  as  "spiel")  of  what 
is  said  than  for  its  truth  and  strength.  Lay 
it  down,  then,  that  one  of  the  first  of  the 
camp  health  rules  is  a  sweating  every  day. 
Third  among  the  camp  rules  is  to  keep  the 
bowels  open.  Do  you  know  what  one  of 
Abraham  Lincoln's  mottoes  for  life  was? 
"Fear  God  and  keep  your  bowels  open," 
and  in  this  saying  there  is  no  irreverence 
whatsoever,  nor  any  sacrilege,  but  only  a 
profound  common  sense  that  is  a  credit  both 
to  the  Maker  and  the  great  man  who  spoke 

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VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

the  words.  Cascara  is  the  best  and  safest 
laxative  for  a  girl  to  use  in  camp.  It 
should  be  bought  in  the  purest  tablets  or 
liquid  form  on  the  market,  and  all  patent 
cascara  nostrums  should  be  avoided.1 

If  a  girl  is  delicate  or  under  the  weather 
in  any  way,  she  must  take  more  than  the 
ordinary  care  of  herself  or  she  may  have  a 
head-on  collision  with  out-and-out  illness. 

1  If  there  is  a  privy  in  the  camp  great  care  should  be 
taken  that,  for  every  reason,  it  is  placed  at  a  sufficient 
distance  from  cabins  and  tents.  It  should  not  be  placed 
on  a  slope  that  could  possibly  drain  off  into  any  water 
supply.  An  abundance  of  ashes  should  always  be  kept 
within  the  privy  and  no  water  of  any  kind  be  poured 
into  the  box.  A  few  cans  of  chloride  of  lime  should,  if 
possible,  be  kept  on  hand;  and  one  can  opened  and  in 
use  in  the  closet.  Chambers  and  slop  pails  should  not 
be  emptied  in  the  immediate  vicinity  of  the  cabins  but 
at  some  distance  and  in  different  localities.  There  is 
no  greater  abomination  on  the  face  of  the  earth  than  a 
dirty  camp,  and  no  place  which  so  thoroughly  tests 
one's  love  of  order,  decency  and  cleanliness.  If  you 
are  following  the  trail  and  go  into  "stocked"  camps  for 
the  night,  shake  and  air  the  blankets  thoroughly,  and, 
out  of  courtesy  to  those  who  will  follow  you  in  their 
use,  shake  and  air  the  blankets  when  you  get  out  of 
them  in  the  morning. 

1 68 


WOOD  CULTURE  AND  CAMP  HEALTH 

The  new  mode  of  living,  the  various  kinds  of 
exposure — especially  to  wet  weather--,  the 
larger  quantities  of  food  eaten  because  of  an 
appetite  stimulated  by  the  vigorous  outdoor 
life,  the  temptation  to  overdoing — all  these 
possibilities  should  be  kept  in  mind  and 
avoided  as  dangers.  Don't  be  silly  about 
overdoing.  Harden  yourself  slowly  for 
the  life;  avoid  competition.  It  is  far  bet- 
ter to  have  lived  your  camp  life  successfully 
and  to  have  come  out  of  it  fresh  and  vigor- 
ous, than  it  is  to  have  done  a  few  "stunts" 
and  have  come  out  of  it  fagged,  overstrained 
and  ill.  It  is  well  the  first  days  of  camp 
life  to  try  to  eat  less  than  you  want;  by  this 
act  of  self-control  you  will  avoid  the  plague 
of  constipation  which  follows  so  many  camp- 
ers. Moderate  eating  will  mean  more 
sleep,  too.  Abundant  water  drinking  and 
a  few  grains  of  cascara  should  be  able  to 
remedy  all  the  ills  to  which  camp  flesh  is 
heir. 

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VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

As  a  girl  takes  thought  about  this  care 
and  culture  of  the  body,  making  herself 
clean  within  and  without,  higher  lessons  and 
perfections,  both  of  the  mind  and  of  the  soul 
will  come  to  her  as  inevitably  as  the  earth 
answers  to  the  touch  of  rain  and  sun.  Do 
you  want  to  be  happy?  Very  well  then, 
learn  in  the  woods  to  be  well,  consider  the 
laws  of  health,  and  remember  first,  last, 
and  always  that  good  health,  not  money  or 
position  or  fame  or  any  shallow  beauty  of 
feature,  is  the  greatest  and  soundest  secur- 
ity for  happiness. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

WILDERNESS  SILENCE 

MOST  friendships  among  girls, 
and  older  people,  too,  suggest 
that  if  there  is  one  thing  which  is 
hated,  it  is  silence.  If  silence  does  happen 
to  get  in  among  us  in  camp,  how  uneasy  we 
are!  After  an  awkward  pause  we  all  begin 
to  talk  at  once, — any,  every  topic  will  serve 
to  break  the  hush  which  has  fallen  upon  us. 
And  if  we  don't  succeed  in  getting  rid  of  this 
silence — something  apparently  to  be  regard- 
ed as  unfriendly  and  ominous — we  make 
excuse  to  do  something  and  do  it. 

But  of  silence  Maurice  Maeterlinck,  the 
great  Belgian  author  of  'The  Bluebird"  and 
of  many  other  plays,  too,  says  that  we  talk 
only  in  the  hours  in  which  we  do  not  live  or 
do  not  wish  to  know  our  friends  or  feel  our- 

171 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

selves  at  a  great  distance  from  reality. 
But  where  do  we  live  more  truly  than  in  our 
camp  life?  Then  he  goes  on  to  say  what  I 
think  is  equally  true:  That  we  are  very  jeal- 
ous of  silence,  for  even  the  most  imprudent 
among  us  will  not  be  silent  with  the  first 
comer,  some  instinct  telling  us  that  it  is  dan- 
gerous to  be  silent  with  one  whom  we  do  not 
wish  to  know  or  for  whom  we  do  not  care 
or  do  not  trust. 

Let  us  admit  at  the  very  beginning  that 
one  does  well  to  be  on  one's  guard  with  the 
people  with  whom  one  does  not  care  to  be 
silent,- -but  one  does  not  go  camping  with 
those  people, — or,  as  the  case  may  be,  if 
we,  ourselves,  have  a  guilty  conscience  or  an 
empty  head  much  talking  serves  its  ends. 
And  there  is  another  situation  in  which  it 
seems  almost  impossible  to  be  silent.  There 
is  someone  for  whom  we  have  cared  very 
much.  Things  have  changed,  there  has 
been  a  misunderstanding,  we  have  altered  or 

172 


WILDERNESS    SILENCE 

someone  else  has  made  trouble  between  us. 
And  the  first  thing  we  notice  is  that  we  no 
longer  dare  to  be  silent  together.  Speech 
must  be  made  to  cover  up  our  common  lack 
of  sympathy.  We  talk,  how  we  talk,— 
anything,  everything!  Even  when  we  are 
happy  we  run  to  places  where  there  is  no 
silence,  but  now,  if  only  we  can  be  as  noisy 
as  children  and  avoid  the  truth  of  the  sad 
thing  which  has  happened  to  us! 

Again,  let  us  admit  at  once  that  there  are 
different  kinds  of  silence:  There  is  a  bitter 
silence  which  is  the  silence  of  hate,  and  an- 
other which  is  that  of  evil  thoughts,  and  a 
hostile  silence,  and  a  silence  which  may 
mean  the  beginning  of  a  storm  or  a  fierce 
warfare.  But  the  only  silence  worth  hav- 
ing is  friendly  and  it  is  of  that  we  need  to 
think,  and  it  is  that  we  can  have  by  the 
camp  fire  in  our  wilderness  life. 

Isn't  it  true  after  all  that  the  question 
which  most  of  us  ought  to  ask  ourselves  se- 

173 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

riously  is  not  how  many  times  we  have  talked 
but  how  many  times  we  have  been  silent. 
Sometimes  one  wonders  whether  we  are  ever 
still  and  whether  if  we  are  to  be  silent,  it  is 
not  a  lesson  which  must  be  learned  all  over 
again.  How  many  times  have  we  talked 
in  a  single  day?  We  can't  tell,  for  the  num- 
ber of  times  is  so  great  that  we  can't  count 
them.  And  the  times  we  have  been  silent? 
And  I  don't  mean  how  many  times  we  have 
said  nothing.  To  say  nothing  is  not  neces- 
sarily to  be  silent.  Well,  we  can't  count 
the  times  we  have  been  silent  either,  but 
that  is  because  we  haven't  been  still  at  all. 
Yet  there  is  a  big  life  in  which  there  is  no 
speech  and  no  need  of  it.  Are  we  never  to 
give  ourselves  a  chance  to  live  that? 

Do  you  remember  your  first  great  silence? 
Was  it  going  away  from  someone  you 
loved?  Perhaps  it  was  a  joyous  visit  to 
your  grandmother  or  to  an  aunt  or  to  see  a 
friend,  but  it  meant  leaving  your  mother  and 


WILDERNESS    SILENCE 

you  had  never  left  her  before.  Or  maybe 
it  was  your  first  year  at  boarding  school  or 
your  freshman  year  at  college.  Do  you  re- 
member the  silence  that  came  over  you  then 
and  all  that  filled  it?  And  do  you  remem- 
ber how  it  wore  away  but  gradually — that 
grip  the  stillness  had  within  you  and 
upon  you?  You  know  now  that  that  first 
silence  will  never  be  forgotten.  Or  was  it 
a  return  to  those  you  loved  and  you  realized 
as  never  before  how  incomparably  dear 
these  people  were  to  you  and  that  only  si- 
lence could  express  that  dearness?  Or  was 
it  the  silence  of  a  crowd — awe  inspiring  si- 
lence which  foretells  the  acclaim  of  some 
great  event  of  happiness  or  a  cry  of  woe? 
Or  the  silence  of  the  wilderness  as  you 
looked  down  from  a  mountain  side  into 
some  great  valley  of  lakes?  Or  was  it  the 
death  of  someone  you  loved,  and  the  silence 
that  overcame  you  forced  you  not  only  to 
suffer  as  never  before  but  also  to  think  as 

'75 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

you  have  never  done  about  the  meaning  of 
life? 

In  that  first  great  silence  how  many  things 
that  are  precious  revealed  themselves  to  us. 
There  was  love;  we  did  not  realize  how  it 
was  woven  into  every  fibre  of  our  lives; 
there  was  companionship;  we  did  not  realize 
how  bitterly  hard  it  would  be  to  forego  it; 
there  was  new  experience;  till  it  came  we 
could  not  have  known  how  much  a  part  of 
our  lives  the  old  experience  was.  How 
many  things  in  us  that  had  been  asleep  were 
suddenly  awakened!  How  much  was  that 
great  silence  worth  to  us  then  and  now? 
Perhaps  an  unhappy  or  stricken  silence  we 
called  it  then;  but  even  if  it  meant  death  or 
separation  was  it  after  all  completely  un- 
happy? Have  we  taken  into  account  the 
wealth  of  conviction,  of  deepened  experience, 
of  increased  love  it  brought  us?  Could 
anything  so  rich  be  in  any  true  sense  un- 
happy? 

176 


WILDERNESS    SILENCE 

"Silence,  the  Great  Empire  of  Silence," 
cried  Carlyle,  "higher  than  the  stars,  deeper 
than  the  Kingdom  of  Death."  The  world 
needs  silent  men  but  even  more,  I  think,  does 
it  need  silent  women.  Carlyle — and  you 
should  get  what  you  can  of  his  books  and 
read  them — calls  silent  men  the  salt  of  the 
earth.  Might  not  silent  women  or  silent 
girls  be  called  double  salt?  He  says 
that  the  world  without  such  men  is  like  a 
tree  without  roots.  To  such  a  tree  there 
will  be  no  leaves  and  no  shade;  to  such  a 
tree  there  will  be  no  growth;  a  tree  without 
roots  cannot  hold  the  moisture  that  is  in 
the  earth  and  it  will  soon  fade,  soon  dry  up 
and  let  everything  else  around  it  dry  up, 
too. 

Have  you  not  heard  women  and  girls 
with  an  incessant  silly  giggle  or  a  titter  or 
a  laugh  that  meant  just  nothing  at  all  and 
yet  which  was  heard,  like  the  dry  rattle  of 
the  locust,  morning,  noon  and  night?  Ner- 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

vousness  partially;  empty-headedness  maybe, 
or  a  mistaken  idea  of  what  is  attractive. 
Silliness  of  that  kind  has  no  place  in  camp. 
Nothing  is  more  wearying,  more  lacking  in 
self-control  than  such  a  manner,  nothing  so 
exhausts  other  people.  Such  giggling  or 
laughing  or  silly  talking  is  to  the  mind  what 
St.  Vitus's  dance  is  to  the  body — an  afflic- 
tion to  be  endured  perhaps  but  certainly  not 
an  attraction  and  not  to  be  cultivated. 

Is  it  not  silence  that  opens  the  door  to  our 
best  work?  How  about  that  work  you  en- 
joyed so  much  and  did  so  well?  How  did 
you  prepare  for  that?  Yes,  I  know  all 
about  the  work  you  bluffed  through  and  even 
managed  to  get  a  high  record  in,  but  that 
work  you  really  enjoyed,  how  was  that 
done?  Is  it  not  silence,  too,  that  opens  the 
door  to  our  dearest  and  deepest  companion- 
ships, our  profoundest  sorrows,  our  greatest 
joys?  Anyway  this  wilderness  silence  is  all 
worth  while  thinking  about,  is  it  not? 


WILDERNESS    SILENCE 

Why  should  this  great  silence,  this  friend- 
ly wilderness  power  be  considered  anti-so- 
cial? Really,  is  it  not  most  social?  Does 
it  not  bring  us  all  nearer  together,  sometimes 
even  when  we  are  afraid  to  be  nearer  to  one 
another?  Does  it  not  make  us  all  equal, 
making  us  aware  of  those  profound  things 
in  life  which  we  all  have  in  common?  Si- 
lence can  say,  can  teach,  what  speech  can 
never,  to  the  end  of  the  world,  learn  to  ex- 
press. It  is  safe  to  say  that  as  soon  as  most 
lips  are  silent,  then  and  then  only  do  the 
thoughts  and  the  soul  begin  to  live,  to  grow, 
to  become  something  of  what  they  are  des- 
tined to  be,  for  as  Maeterlinck  says,  silence 
ripens  the  fruits  of  the  soul.  Never  think 
that  it  is  unsociable  people  or  people  who 
don't  know  how  to  talk  who  set  such  a  value 
on  silence.  No,  it  is  those  who  are  able  to 
talk  best  and  most  deeply,  think  best  and 
most  deeply,  who,  following  the  long  trail, 
recognize  the  fact  that  words  can  never  after 

179 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

all  express  those  truths  which  are  among 
us — no,  neither  love,  nor  death,  nor  any 
great  joy,  nor  destiny  can  ever  be  expressed 
by  word  of  mouth,  by  speech. 


CHAPTER   XVII 

HOMEMADE   CAMPING 

IT  was  our  second  day  in  camp, — a 
camp  on  the  edge  of  the  Maine  wil- 
derness. Around  us  were  many 
lakes — ponds  as  the  natives  call  them — 
Moosehead,  Upper  Wilson,  Lower  Wilson, 
Little  Wilson,  Trout  Pond,  Horse-shoe 
Pond,  and  a  dozen  others.  About  us  on 
all  sides  were  the  forest-covered  mountains, 
and  burning  fiercely,  twenty  miles  distant,  a 
large  forest  fire  which  filled  the  horizon 
with  dense,  yellow  smoke. 

From  our  camp,  consisting  of  a  red 
shanty,  a  log  cabin  in  which  I  am  now  sit- 
ting, my  dog  beside  me,  thinking  what  I  shall 
say  to  you  about  a  remarkable  family  I  saw, 
and,  looking  up  at  the  cabin  ceiling,  its  log 
ridge-pole  and  supports  between  which  are 

181 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

birch  bark  cuts  of  trout  and  salmon  caught 
in  the  lakes,  of  which  I  have  spoken — from 
our  camp  we  look  out  and  down  on  a  won- 
derful view.  Immediately  in  front  of  the 
log  cabin  is  a  meadow,  the  last  on  the  edge 
of  this  wilderness,  then  the  serrated  line  of 
pointed  firs,  which  marks  the  edge  of  the 
woods  at  the  foot  of  the  meadow.  Beyond 
this  line  miles  of  tree-tops,  pines,  birches, 
maples,  beeches,  after  that  the  shining  lakes, 
and  beyond  them  the  mountains.  There  is 
not  a  house  in  sight.  For  that  matter  there 
is  no  house  to  be  seen,  not  even  a  log  cabin. 
As  was  said,  there  is  a  meadow  in  front 
of  the  cabin,  and  over  to  the  right  beyond 
our  view  are  two  other  meadows.  In  Maine 
— as  far  north  as  this,  anyway — the  farmers 
have  only  one  crop  of  hay,  and,  when  there 
is  so  much  forest,  and  the  winter  is  long,  and 
cattle  are  to  be  fed,  every  meadow  has  to 
be  counted  upon  for  all  it  will  bear  of  hay. 
It  was  a  foregone  conclusion  that  somebody 

182 


HOMEMADE    CAMPING 

would  need  and  use  the  crop  from  the  mea- 
dow down  upon  which  my  cabin  looked. 

And,  sure  enough,  the  second  day  we  were 
in  camp,  along  the  road  bumping  and  thump- 
ing over  the  big  stones  came  a  large  hay 
wagon:  behind  it,  rattling  and  jarring,  a 
mowing  machine  and  hay  rake.  But  that 
hay  wagon,  what  didn't  it  hold?  In  the  first 
place,  there  was  the  driver,  then  a  big  pack- 
ing box,  a  tent  rolled  up,  sacks  of  feed  for 
the  horses,  a  baby's  perambulator,  three  chil- 
dren, a  woman,  a  hammock,  a  long  bench, 
some  chairs,  including  a  rocking  chair,  and 
several  small  boxes,  packed  to  overflowing 
with  articles  of  various  kinds.  For  an  in- 
stant it  looked  as  if  they  were  house-moving, 
and  then,  recollecting  that  there  was  no' 
house  to  which  to  move,  I  came  to  the  con- 
clusion that  they  were  merely  haying. 

I  watched  them  spread  the  big  tent-fly  and 
make  it  fast.  I  saw  them  take  out  the  large 
packing  box,  converting  that  into  a  table,  on 

183 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

which  some  of  the  children  put  flowers  in  an 
old  bottle ;  I  watched  them  set  out  the  bench 
and  chairs,  swing  the  hammock,  lay  the  im- 
provised table  with  the  enamel  dishes  which 
they  took  from  the  little  boxes,  and,  in  gen- 
eral, make  themselves  comfortable. 

The  children  had  pails  for  berries,  and 
they  began  to  pick  berries  in  a  business-like 
fashion.  The  woman  sat  in  the  hammock 
and  took  care  of  the  baby — oh,  I  forgot  to 
mention  the  baby.  The  farmer  and  his  lad 
hitched  and  unhitched  the  horses,  starting 
within  a  few  minutes  to  work  with  the  mow- 
ing machine,  and  leaving  two  of  the  horses 
tethered  to  a  tree.  Evidently  this  was  work 
and  a  picnic  combined — to  me  a  new  way  of 
getting  in  your  hay  crop.  But  the  more  I 
watched  it  and  thought  about  it  the  more  I 
liked  it.  And  their  dinner  with  the  berries 
as  dessert — well,  I  knew  just  how  good, 
there  in  the  sunshine,  with  appetites  sharp- 
ened by  work,  it  must  taste  to  them  all. 

184 


HOMEMADE    CAMPING 

Inside  the  cottage  shanty  of  our  camp,  one 
member  of  the  household,  at  least,  had  been 
doing  her  work  in  quite  a  different  spirit.  It 
seemed  to  me  that  there  was  nothing  which 
this  cook,  a  large,  robust  woman,  with  an 
arm  with  the  strength  of  five,  had  not  found 
fault  with  and  made  the  worst  of.  Her 
first  groan  was  heard  in  the  morning  at  six 
o'clock — in  getting  up  myself  to  go  to  my 
writing  table  I  had  cruelly  awakened  her — 
and,  of  course,  as  she  wrent  to  bed  only  half 
after  seven  the  night  before,  she  had  been 
robbed  of  her  necessary  sleep.  As  I  say,  I 
heard  her  first  groan — the  sun  was  shining 
gloriously,  and  I  had  already  had  a  sun  bath 
and  a  cold  sponge  and  my  morning  exercises 
— while  she  continued  to  lie  in  bed  and  to 
make  every  subsequent  groan  until  after 
seven  o'clock  fully  audible. 

She  began  that  beautiful  day  and  its  work 
in  resisting  everything.  She  had  never  been 
in  such  a  place  before,  and  a  very  nice  con- 

185 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

venient  camp  we,  ourselves,  thought  it.  She 
groaned  while  she  pumped  water — I  do  not 
know  whether  she  or  the  pump  made  the 
more  noise.  She  complained  loudly  because 
of  the  mice.  Oh,  no,  she  could  not  set  a 
mouse  trap:  she  had  never  done  such  a  thing 
before!  And  then,  when  we  got  a  cat,  she 
complained  because  of  the  noise  the  cat  made 
in  catching  the  mice.  I  do  not  know  pre- 
cisely what  kind  of  a  cat  she  expected,  possi- 
bly a  noiseless,  rubber-tired  cat,  that  would 
catch  noiseless,  rubber-tired  mice.  She  would 
not  carry  water — even  a  two-quart  pail  full 
— her  back  was  not  strong  enough.  She  had 
never  seen  such  dishes  as  these  we  were 
using,  nice,  clean  enamel  ware  dishes,  with 
blue  borders.  She  had  never  heard  of  such 
a  thing  as  hanging  milk  and  butter  in  a  well 
to  keep  them  cool.  Dear  me,  she  never  even 
thought  of  going  to  such  a  place  where  they 
did  not  have  ice  that  would  automatically 
cool  everything,  and  which  the  ice-man  kindly 

1 86 


HOMEMADE    CAMPING 

handed  to  her  in  pieces  just  the  size 
which  she  preferred.  She  said  the  spring — 
a  beautiful  spring  whose  waters  are  re- 
nowned for  their  purity  and  healthfulness 
much  as  the  waters  of  Poland  Spring  are — 
she  said  that  the  spring  had  pollywogs  in  it 
and  frogs.  She  could  not  string  a  clothes- 
line, but  stood  in  tears  near  the  big  trunk  of 
a  balsam  fir,  holding  the  line  helplessly  in 
her  hands  and  looking  up  to  the  branch  not 
more  than  two  inches  above  her  head. 
While  one  of  us  flung  the  end  of  the  clothes- 
line over  the  branch  and  made  it  fast  to  an- 
other she  remarked  with  contempt,  sniffing 
up  her  tears,  that  it  was  not  a  clothes-line, 
anyway,  which  was  perfectly  true,  for  it  was 
only  a  boat  cord,  but  it  did  quite  as  well. 
When  she  walked  down  from  the  meadow, 
that  glorious  golden  meadow,  where  the  hap- 
py family  was  picnicking  and  hay-making  at 
the  same  time,  and  through  which  wound  a 
little  path  down  to  the  spring's  edge,  she 

187 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

lifted  her  skirts  as  if  she  were  afraid  they 
might  be  contaminated  by  the  touch  of  that 
clean,  sweet-smelling,  long  grass.  Still 
groaning  she  would  fetch  about  a  quart  of 
water.  And  groaning,  still  groaning,  she 
went  to  bed  at  night  "half-dead,"  as  she  ex- 
pressed it,  as  the  result  of  about  five  hours 
of  work,  in  which  she  was  all  the  time  helped 
by  somebody  else. 

Of  course  she  was  "half-dead."  It  is  a 
wonder  to  me  now,  as  I  think  of  it,  that  she 
did  not  die  altogether.  Instead  of  taking 
things  as  they  were  in  the  sun-filled  day,  with 
its  keen,  crisp  air,  its  wonderful  view,  instead 
of  feeling  something  of  the  beauty  and 
health  and  sun  and  wind-swept  cleanness  of 
it  all,  she  had  resisted  every  detail  of  the 
day,  every  part  of  her  work,  she  had,  in 
short,  found  fault  with  everything.  This 
day,  that  would  have  seemed  so  joyous  to 
some  people,  had  not  meant  to  her  an  op- 
portunity to  make  the  best  of  things  and  to 


HOMEMADE    CAMPING 

be  grateful  for  the  long  sleep,  the  sunshine, 
the  invigorating  air,  the  beauty,  the  light 
work,  but  merely  a  chance  to  make  the  worst 
of  things,  to  throw  herself  against  every 
demand  made  upon  her. 

Out  in  front  of  the  cabin  the  farmer  swept 
round  and  round  with  his  mowing  machine, 
his  big,  glossy  horses  glistening  in  the  sun- 
shine, the  sharp  teeth  of  the  machine  laying 
the  grass  in  a  wide  swath  behind  him.  He 
seemed  peaceful  and  contented,  although  it 
was  warm  out  in  the  direct  sunlight,  and  the 
brakes  were  heavy  and  the  'horses  needed 
constant  guiding.  Down  below,  nearer  the 
spring,  his  wife  swung  in  the  hammock,  and 
the  children  picked  berries,  fetched  water, 
and  were  gleefully  busy.  It  was  a  scene  of 
simple  contentment  with  life. 

When  the  father  came  back  for  his  din- 
ner, which  was  eaten  under  the  spread  of  a 
tent-fly  and  from  the  top  of  a  packing  box, 
decorated  in  the  center  with  flowers  and 

189 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

around  the  edges  by  contented  faces,  I  said 
to  him:  'You  seem  to  be  having  a  jolly 
time." 

'Why,  yes,  so  we  are,"  was  his  reply.  "I 
offered  the  folks  who  own  this  meadow  such 
a  small  sum  of  money  for  the  hay  crop 
I  didn't  think  I'd  get  it.  I  thought  some 
one  else  was  sure  to  offer  them  more,  but  I 
guess  they  didn't,  for  I  got  it.  You  see,  it's 
pretty  far  away  from  my  farm  to  come  out 
here  haying." 

"And  so  you  make  a  picnic  of  it?" 

'Yes,  we  are  making  a  picnic  of  it.  The 
children  like  it.  It's  great  fun  for  them,  and 
it  gives  my  wife,  who  isn't  very  strong,  a 
chance  to  rest  and  be  out  of  doors.  I  en- 
joy it,  too.  I  like  to  see  them  have  a  good 
time." 

"Well,"  I  said,  before  I  realized  I  was 
taking  him  into  my  confidence,  ''I  wish  you 
could  make  our  camp  cook  see  your  point  of 


view.' 


190 


HOMEMADE    CAMPING 

'Why,  don't  she  like  it?"  he  asked  inno- 
cently. 

"Like  it?  I  am  afraid  she  doesn't.  The 
other  day  it  rained  and  leaked  in  through 
the  kitchen  roof  onto  her  ironing  board,  and 
when  we  found  her  she  had  her  head  on  the 
board  and  was  crying." 

"Well,  that's  too  bad,"  he  said.  "Why 
didn't  she  take  that  board  out  of  the  way  of 
the  leak?  We  don't  mind  a  little  thing  like 
a  leak  around  here,  especially  when  folks  are 
camping.  Having  her  feel  that  way  must 
make  a  difference  in  your  pleasure.  Well, 
there  is  ways  of  taking  work.  Now,  prob- 
ably, she's  throwing  herself  against  her 
work,  and  making  it  harder  all  the  time." 

'That's  exactly  what  she  is  doing,"  I  com- 
mented dryly. 

'It's  a  pity."  There  was  sympathy  in  his 
voice.  ''For  it's  such  a  lot  easier  to  make  a 
picnic  out  of  what  you  are  doing — home- 
made camping,  we  call  this.  My  folks  al- 

191 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

ways  feel  that  way  about  it.  Even  the  hard- 
est work  is  easier  for  taking  it  the  right  end 
to.  My  children  are  growing  up  to  think, 
what  it  doesn't  hurt  any  man  to  think,  that 
work  is  the  best  fun,  after  all.  It's  the  only 
thing  you  never  get  tired  of,  for  there  is  al- 
ways something  more  to  do." 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

THE  CANOE  AND  FISHING 

IT  was  my  somewhat  tempered  good 
fortune,  several  years  ago,  to  spend 
two  or  three  weeks  in  an  exceedingly 
bleak  place  on  a  far  northern  coast.  The 
only  genial  element  about  this  barren  spot 
was  its  sea  captains,  and  whence  they  drew 
their  geniality  heaven  only  knows.  They 
made  me  think  of  nothing  so  much  as  of  the 
warm  lichen  which  sometimes  flourishes  upon 
cold  rocks.  There  strayed  into  this  neigh- 
borhood a  couple  of  canoes.  'Waal,"  ex- 
claimed one  of  the  old  salts,  viewing  this 
water  craft  skeptically,  "it's  the  nearest  next 
to  nothing  of  anything  I  have  ever  heard 
tell  on." 

And  that  is  precisely  what  the  canoe  is: 
the  nearest  next  to  nothing  in  water  craft 

193 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

which  you  can  imagine.  It  is  in  precisely 
this  nothingness  that  its  charm  lies,  its  light- 
ness, its  grace,  its  friskiness,  its  strength,  its 
motion,  its  adaptability  to  circumstances. 
There  are  times  when  it  acts  like  a  demon, 
and  there  are  other  times  when  its  intelli- 
gence is  almost  uncanny.  The  canoe  is  al- 
ways high  spirited,  and,  with  high-spirited 
things,  whether  they  be  horseflesh  or  canoe, 
it  does  not  do  to  trifle.  The  girl  who  expects 
to  take  liberties  with  the  canoe  has  some 
dreadful,  if  not  fatal,  experiences  ahead  of 
her.  Several  years  ago  I  was  out  in  a  motor 
boat  with  some  friends.  Two  of  them  had 
been,  or  were,  connected  with  the  United 
States  Navy;  another  was  my  sister,  and  a 
fourth  was  a  college  friend.  My  friend 
happened  to  see  a  pistol  lying  on  a  seat 
near  her.  She  had  never  had  anything 
to  do  with  pistols,  and,  on  some  insane 
impulse  of  the  moment,  she  picked  it  up  and 
leveled  it  at  me.  I  was  stunned,  but  not  so 

194 


THE    CANOE    AND    FISHING 

the  men  on  the  boat.  Such  a  shout  of  rage 
and  indignation,  such  a  leap  to  seize  the  pis- 
tol, and  such  a  rebuke,  I  have  never  been 
witness  to  before.  These  men  were  navy 
men,  and  they  knew  how  criminally  foolish 
it  is  to  fool  with  what  may  bring  disaster. 
It  is  those  who  know  the  canoe  best  and  are 
best  able  to  handle  it,  who  are  most  cautious 
in  its  use.  Those  of  you  who  expect  to  treat 
it  as  you  might  the  family  horse  would  do 
well  to  look  out. 

The  canvas-covered  cedar  canoe  is  the 
best.  If  you  are  going  to  take  a  lot  of  duf- 
fle with  you,  the  canoes  will  have  to  be  longer 
than  you  need  otherwise  have  them:  about 
eighteen  feet,  and  only  two  people  to  a 
canoe.  The  canoe  will  cost  you  from  twen- 
ty-five dollars  up,  and  this  item  does  not  in- 
clude the  paddle.  The  paddle  should  be 
bought  exactly  your  own  height;  it  will 
then  be  an  ideal  length  for  paddling.  Its 
cost  will  be  a  little  more  or  a  little  less  than 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

a  dollar  and  a  half.  You  should  have  a 
large  sponge,  tied  to  a  string,  on  one  of  the 
thwarts.  This  you  will  use  for  bailing  when 
necessary. 

If  you  have  had  any  experience  with  a 
canoe,  you  will  not  abuse  it,  and  will  not 
need  to  be  told  not  to  abuse  it.  If  it  is  a 
light  one,  and  you  are  a  strong  girl,  you 
should  learn  to  carry  it  Micmac  fashion  on 
the  paddle  blades,  a  sweater  over  your  shoul- 
ders to  serve  as  cushion.  Watch  a  woods- 
man and  see  the  way  he  handles  a  canoe. 
One  of  the  very  first  things  you  will  observe 
is  that  he  never  drags  it  about,  but  lifts  it 
clean  off  the  ground  by  the  thwarts,  holding 
the  concave  side  toward  him.  Also,  you 
should  observe  his  soft-footed  movements 
when  he  is  stepping  into  a  canoe.  If  a  canoe 
is  not  in  use  it  should  be  turned  upside  down. 
Never  neglect  your  canoe,  for  a  small  punc- 
ture in  it  is  like  the  proverbial  small  hole  in 
a  dike.  If  you  let  it  go,  you  will  have  a 

196 


THE    CANOE    AND    FISHING 

heavy,  water-soaked  craft  or  a  swamped  one. 
Water  soaking  turns  a  seemingly  intelligent, 
high-spirited  canoe,  capable  of  answering  to 
your  least  wish  or  touch,  into  the  most  lunk- 
headed  thing  imaginable,  a  thing  so  stupid 
and  so  dead  and  so  obstinate,  that  life  with 
it  becomes  a  burden.  Remember  that  the 
wounds  in  your  canoe  need  quite  as  much 
attention  as  your  own  would. 

The  balance  of  a  canoe  is  a  ticklish  thing. 
To  the  novice,  the  day  when  she  can  paddle 
through  stiff  water  while  she  trolls  with  a 
rod  under  her  knee  and  lands  a  two-  or 
three-pound  salmon  unaided,  seems  far  off. 
I  am  by  no  means  a  past-master  in  the  art  of 
canoeing,  yet  I  have  often  done  this,  and  am 
no  longer  troubled  by  the  question  of  bal- 
ance in  a  canoe.  So  much  for  encourage- 
ment! Most  of  an  art  lies,  granting  the 
initial  gift  for  it,  in  custom  or  habit.  Make 
yourself  familiar  with  the  traits  of  your 
canoe,  work  hard  to  learn  everything  you 

197 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

should  know  about  it,  and  your  lesson  will 
soon  be  learned. 

When  you  are  going  to  get  into  it,  have 
your  canoe  securely  beside  a  landing,  and 
then  step  carefully  into  the  center  and  mid- 
dle. Bring  the  second  foot  after  the  first 
only  when  you  are  sure  that  you  have  your 
balance.  The  next  thing  is  to  sit  down.  Be 
certain  that  it  is  not  in  the  water.  The 
only  satisfactory  recipe  for  this  delicate  act 
is  to  do  it.  No  girl  should  step  into  a  canoe 
for  the  first  time  without  some  one  at  the 
bow  to  steady  it.  Very  quickly  you  will 
learn  clever  ways  of  using  your  paddle  to 
help  in  keeping  the  balance.  Until  you  do, 
you  can't  be  too  careful,  or  too  careful  that 
others  should  be  careful.  Take  no  chances 
in  a  canoe.  If  any  are  taken  for  you,  hang 
on  to  your  paddle.  It  is  well  to  have  an  in- 
flatable life-preserver,  but,  best  of  all,  is  it 
to  know  how  to  swim.  Never  move  around 
in  a  canoe,  or  turn  quickly  to  look  over  your 

198 


W-^y  ,;^  vSr^M:  ^J£r~i 

r^" 

^»      WHI 

W.J-frr 


199 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR    GIRLS 

shoulder.  A  canoe  is  a  long-suffering  thing, 
but  once  "riled"  and  its  mind  made  up  to 
capsize,  heaven  and  earth  cannot  prevent 
that  consummation  and  your  ducking  or  even 
drowning. 

Become  skillful  in  the  use  of  the  paddle, 
and  the  best  way  to  learn  is  through  some 
one  who  knows  how.  Paddling  is  an  art 
and  a  very  delightful  one,  requiring  much 
skill  of  touch  and  strength.  Although  as  a 
girl  I  cared  most  for  rowing,  I  have  in  the 
last  ten  years  become  so  devoted  to  the  pad- 
dle stroke,  to  its  motion  and  touch  and  effi- 
ciency, that  rowing  only  bores  me.  Get 
some  one,  a  brother,  a  father,  a  friend,  a 
guide,  to  teach  you  the  rudiments  of  pad- 
dling. These  once  learned,  canoeing  is  as 
safe  as  bicycling  and  not  more  difficult.  It  is 
all  in  learning  how. 

The  writer  is  an  old-fashioned  fisher- 
woman  and  goes  light  with  tackle.  How- 
ever, I  have  noticed  that  the  simplicity  of  fish- 

200 


ROD. 


SIMPLE  WINCH 
REEL. 


HOOKS. 


TROUT  FLY.  TROLLING  SPOONS. 


2O I 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

ing  tackle  does  not  in  the  least  interfere  with 
luck.  If  you  are  going  to  fish  with  worm, 
hook,  and  sinker,  you  will  need  no  advice. 
Perch,  pickerel,  black  bass,  cat-fish,  and 
others  to  be  caught  in  still  fishing,  will  be 
your  quarry.  As  a  rule  you  will  troll  for 
pickerel  and  pike,  and  there  is  no  sport  more 
pleasant  in  the  world  than  that  which  is  to 
be  had  at  the  end  of  a  trolling  spoon:  the 
motion  of  the  boat,  the  vibration  of  the  line, 
the  spinning  of  the  spoon,  and  then  the  sud- 
den strike,  with  all  its  possibilities  for  tak- 
ing in  big  fish.  I  defy  anyone  to  have  a 
more  exciting  time  than  netting  a  salmon 
from  a  trolling  line  and  landing  it  success- 
fully in  a  canoe.  But  this  is  not  a  thing  to 
be  attempted  by  the  novice.  Much  better  let 
the  salmon  go  and  save  yourself  a  ducking. 

The  finest  art  of  all  fishing  is  fly-fishing. 
One  either  does  or  does  not  take  to  it  natur- 
ally, after  one  has  been  taught  something  of 
the  art  by  brother,  father,  or  guide.  Alas, 

202 


THE    CANOE   AND    FISHING 

that  the  fish  greediness  of  campers  is  mak- 
ing good  fly-fishing,  even  in  the  wilderness, 
more  and  more  difficult  to  get!  Personally, 
if  I  am  after  trout  or  salmon,  "plugging"  or 
"bating,"  as  it  is  called,  seems  to  me  an  un- 
pardonably  coarse  and  stupid  sport.  Yet  our 
lakes  have  been  so  abused  by  this  process 
that  fly-fishing  is  frequently  impossible.  To 
sit  or  stand  in  a  canoe,  casting  your  line,  the 
canoe  taking  every  flex  of  your  wrist;  to  see 
the  bright  flies,  Parmachenee  Belle  or  Silver 
Doctor — or  whatever  fly  suits  that  part  of 
the  country  in  which  you  are  camping — alight 
on  the  surface  as  if  gifted  with  veritable  life, 
and  then  to  be  conscious  of  the  rush,  the 
strike,  and  to  see  a  rainbow  trout  whirling 
off  with  your  silken  line,  is  to  experience  an 
incomparable  pleasure.  To  have  a  strike 
while  the  twilight  is  coming  on,  a  big  fel- 
low, with  the  line  spinning  off  your  reel  as  if 
it  would  never  stop,  to  see  your  salmon  leap 
into  the  air  and  strike  the  water,  to  reel  him 

203 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

in,  then  plunge !  and  down,  down  he  goes ; 
to  feel  the  twilight  deepening  as  you  try 
to  get  him  in  closer  to  the  canoe  again;  to 
know  suddenly  that  it  is  dark  and  that  the 
hours  are  going  by;  to  feel  your  wrist  ach- 
ing, your  body  tense  with  excitement;  to 
think  that  you  are  just  tiring  him  out,  that 
you  have  almost  got  him — almost,  then  a 
rush,  a  plunge,  the  line  slackens  in  your  hand, 
and  he  is  gone.  That  is  fisherman's  luck, 
and  great  luck  it  is,  even  when  the  fish  is 
lost. 

Only  a  few  words  about  fishing  tackle. 
Have  a  good  rod  or  two,  but  don't  begin 
your  experience  at  fishing  with  expensive 
tackle.  The  cheaper  rod  will  do  quite  as 
well  until  you  learn  what  you  want.  For 
trolling  the  best  rod  is  a  short  steel  one. 
For  fly-fishing  you  will  always  use  split  bam- 
boo or  some  similar  wood.  You  will  have 
accidents,  so  have  reserve  tackle  to  fall  back 
upon.  In  any  event  do  not  buy  a  heavy 

204 


ROD  CASE 


FELT-LINED   LEADER   BOX. 


CASE   FOR  TACKLE 


CREEL. 


LANDING   NET 


2O5 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR   GIRLS 

rod,  and  never  buy  anything  with  a  steel 
core  in  it.  If  you  can  afford  it,  get  a  first- 
class  reel,  one  that  works  easily  and  is  of 
simple  mechanism.  A  simple  winch  reel  is 
the  best.  Avoid  patented  contraptions. 
While  you  are  using  them  hang  your  rods  up 
by  the  tips.  In  any  event  keep  them  dry  and 
in  as  good  condition  as  possible.  Enameled 
silk  line  you  must  have  for  all  trout  fishing. 
For  other  kinds  of  fishing  it  does  not  so 
much  matter  what  you  do  use,  provided  the 
line  is  strong  and  durable.  Be  sure  to  have 
extra  lines  to  fall  back  on. 

Leaders,  the  details  about  flies  to  be  used, 
their  color,  angling  knots  made  in  fastening 
leaders  or  line  or  fly,  methods  for  keeping 
your  flies  in  good  order  and  condition,  the 
use  of  the  landing  net,  necessary  repairs  to 
be  made,  the  skill  of  the  wrist  in  casting,  the 
best  sort  of  trolling,  the  care  of  fish,  all  these 
things  will  come  to  you  through  experience, 
and  all  suggest  how  much,  how  delightfully 

206 


ANGLING  KNOTS. 


207 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

much,  there  is  to  be  learned  in  the  best  of  all 
sports. 

Go  to  some  first-rate  sporting  goods'  house 
for  your  flies;  they  will  tell  you  what  kinds 
you  need,  as  well  as  answer  other  questions. 


CHAPTER  XIX 

THE     TRAIL 

A  GIRL  who  has  learned  to  camp 
will  not  only  have  her  own  pleas- 
ures greatly  increased,  but  she  will 
also  add  to  those  of  her  friends,  becoming  a 
better  companion  for  her  chums,  her  father, 
her  brother;  for  camping,  if  it  is  anything, 
is  a  social  art.  It  is  far  better  for  a  girl 
to  be  out  in  the  world  which  demands  all  of 
one's  attention,  one's  eyes  and  ears  and  nose 
and  feet  and  hands  and  every  muscle  of  the 
entire  body,  than  to  be  leading  a  sedentary 
life  at  home,  or  analyzing  emotions  or  senti- 
mentalizing about  things  not  worth  while. 
The  big  moose  which  unexpectedly  plunges 
by  provides  enough  emotions  to  last  a  long 
time;  the  land-locked  salmon  that  threatens 
to  snap  the  silken  line,  enough  excitement. 

209 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

You  can't  learn  all  that  there  is  to  be 
learned  in  the  school  of  the  woods  through 
one  camping  expedition.  It  would  be  rather 
poor  sport  if  you  could.  Don't  be  afraid  to 
ask  questions  about  what  you  don't  know. 
Keep  on  asking  them  until  you  are  wood-cul- 
tivated. The  wilderness  is  your  opportunity 
to  make  up  for  those  vitally  interesting  facts 
about  life  which  are  not  taught  in  schools. 
Above  all,  have  a  map  of  the  country  in 
which  you  are,  and  study  it.  Keep  that  map 
by  you  as  if  it  were  Fidus  Achates  himself, 
and  refer  to  it  whenever  there  is  need.  The 
girl  or  woman  in  camp  who  never  knows 
where  she  is  is  a  bore,  sponging  upon  the 
good-nature  and  intelligence  of  others  who 
have  taken  the  trouble  to  familiarize  them- 
selves with  the  lie  of  the  land.  Such  a 
girl  never  makes  any  plans,  never  takes  the 
initiative,  never  gives  anyone  a  sense  of  rest 
from  responsibility.  There  are  girls  and 
older  women  who  think  it  rather  clever  to 

210 


THE    TRAIL 

be  unable  to  tell  east  from  west,  north  from 
south.  I  may  say  here  that  in  camp  they 
belong  to  the  same  class  of  foolish  incompe- 
tents who  in  college  boast  that  they  cannot 
spell — presumably  because  they  are  devoting 
themselves  to  a  much  higher  call  upon  their 
intelligence  than  anything  so  superficial  as 
spelling!  If  camping  means  anything  in  the 
world,  it  means  cooperation,  and  this  coop- 
eration should  be  all  along  the  line. 

If  you  have  an  innate  sense  of  direction, 
train  it.  If  you  have  none,  do  not  venture 
out  into  the  wilderness  except  with  someone 
who  has.  Always  tell  people  where  you  are 
going.  If  you  are  not  familiar  with  the  use 
of  a  rifle  you  would  better  have  a  shrill  whis- 
tle or  a  tin  horn  to  use  in  case  you  want  to 
summon  anyone.  Sun  and  wind  should  be 
part  of  your  compass;  the  trees,  too.  You 
will,  of  course,  learn  how  to  blaze  a  trail, 
and  the  sooner  you  do  this  the  better,  for  it 
is  good  training  in  following  out  a  point  of 

211 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

the  compass.  The  wilderness  is  full  of  signs 
of  direction  for  your  use,  some  of  which  are 
certain  to  be  serviceable  at  different  times, 
and  some  of  which  will  not  prove  depend- 
able. The  sun  rises  in  the  east  and  sets  in 
the  west.  At  high  noon  of  a  September  day, 
if  you  turn  your  back  squarely  to  the  sun, 
you  will  be  looking  directly  north.  The 
wind  is  a  helper,  too.  When  the  sun  rises, 
notice  the  direction  of  the  wind,  and,  while 
it  does  not  shift,  it  will  prove  a  good  com- 
pass or  guide.  If  it  is  very  light,  wet  the 
finger  and  hold  it  up.  By  doing  this  the  wind 
will  serve  you  as  a  compass.  Remember, 
also,  that  the  two  lowest  stars  of  the  Big 
Dipper  point  toward  the  North  Star,  which 
is  always  a  guide  to  be  used  in  charting  a 
wilderness  way.  Also  on  the  north  sides  of 
trees  there  is  greater  thickness  to  the  bark 
and  more  moss.  This  is,  I  suppose,  because 
the  trees,  being  unexposed  to  the  sunlight  on 
the  north  side,  retain  the  moisture  longer 

212 


*- *,  .---* 


\ 
% 


THE  DIPPER. 


213 


*, 


1 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

there.  Some  say,  too,  that  the  very  topmost 
finger  of  an  evergreen  points  toward  the 
north.  Even  in  civilization  they  usually  do. 
To  become  familiar  with  a  compass  is  a  very 
simple  matter.  Every  boy  learns  this  lesson, 
and  there  is  no  reason  why  girls  should  not 
do  the  same.  Never  buy  a  cheap  compass; 
it  is  not  to  be  relied  upon.  To  the  amateur 
in  the  woods  a  good  one  is  not  a  friend  at 
which  to  scoff.  A  few  expeditions  out  be- 
hind the  cabin  will  teach  you  all  you  need 
to  know  about  its  use.  If  by  some  miscal- 
culation a  girl  should  get  lost,  let  her  realize 
then  that  the  great  demand  is  that  she  shall 
keep  her  head  on  her  shoulders,  where  it  has 
been  placed,  and  where  she  will  need  to  make 
use  of  it.  Let  her  sit  down  and  think,  re- 
viewing all  that  has  happened,  and  trying  to 
solve  the  problem  of  what  she  is  to  do.  A 
panic  is  the  last  and  worst  thing  in  which 
she  can  afford  to  indulge.  To  most  people 
at  some  time  or  other  comes  the  conviction 

214 


FAWN 


DOtl 


BUCK 


CATJIBOU 


MOOSE 


215 


VACATION    CAMPING   FOR   GIRLS 

that  they  are  lost — a  conviction  happily  dis- 
pelled in  nine  hundred  and  ninety-nine  cases 
out  of  a  thousand.  In  this,  as  in  everything, 
a  miss  is  as  good  as  a  mile,  and  one  does 
well  to  make  light  of  unavoidable  mistakes. 

If,  by  any  chance,  you  should  be  lost,  don't 
run  around.  If  you  have  no  compass  or  if 
darkness  is  coming  on,  settle  down  where  you 
are.  Devote  your  energies  to  occasional 
periods  of  shouting  and  to  building  a  camp 
fire,  keep  your  body  warm  and  dry  and  your 
head  cool.  You  will  be  found.  And  remem- 
ber that  there  are  no  wild  creatures  to  be 
feared  in  our  camping  wilderness.  You  have 
nothing  of  which  to  be  afraid  except  your 
own  lack  of  common  sense.  Here  is  a  chance 
for  your  "nerve"  to  show  itself. 

As  you  go  through  the  woods,  cross  the 
ponds  and  lakes,  climb  mountains,  your 
luncheon  in  your  pocket,  compass  and  knife 
and  cup  and  match-box  all  ready  and  friendly 
to  your  hand;  as  you  feel  the  wilderness  be- 

216 


SQUIRREL. 


FLYING    SQ.UIRREL  GRAY    SQ.UIWREL 


•RABBIT. 


AMERICAN  SABLE: 


CHIPMUNK 


;  .,   g'tejr** 
PORCUPINE. 


SKUNK 


VVOODCMUCK 


217 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

coming  more  and  more  your  empire,  be  sure 
that  you  do  not  abuse  the  privileges  which 
are  revealed  to  you.  The  more  gentle  and 
considerate  you  are  in  this  life  which  has 
opened  itself  up  to  you,  the  more  it  will  tell 
you  its  secrets.  That  you  should  leave  dis- 
figuration and  destruction  and  bloodshed  be- 
hind you  does  not  prove  that  you  are  in  any 
sense  a  true  sport.  The  camera  is  one 
of  the  best  guns  for  the  wilderness.  It  is 
better  to  be  film-thirsty  than  bloodthirsty.  A 
girl  who  is  in  earnest  about  camera  shooting 
can  test  her  "nerves"  quite  sufficiently  for  all 
practical  purposes.  How  about  facing,  or 
chasing,  a  six-  or  seven-hundred-pound 
moose,  plunging  down  through  a  cut  or  a 
trail,  and  having  the  nerve  to  press  the  bulb 
at  just  the  right  moment?  Or  a  big  buck? 
Or  a  little  bear?  Or  a  porcupine?  A  good 
kodak  and  some  rolls  of  film  are  all  that  is 
needed  to  begin  the  work  of  photography. 
A  fine  way  to  do,  if  you  intend  to  go  into 

218 


THE    TRAIL 

the  matter  seriously,  is  to  get  some  book  on 
nature  photography  and  make  a  thorough 
study  of  it.  Other  books,  too,  there  are, 
which  will  be  full  of  profit  for  you  as  you 
come  to  know  the  wilderness  life.  Begin 
with  Thoreau,  John  Burroughs,  John  Muir, 
Stewart  White,  Ernest  Seton  Thompson,  and 
these  will  lead  you  on  and  out  through  a 
host  of  nature  books  and  finally  into  a  more 
technical  literature  on  hunting,  camping,  and 
the  wilderness  life  in  general. 

I  believe  that  in  the  end  an  intelligent 
study  of  the  woods  made  with  eyes  and  ears, 
heart  and  mind,  notebook  and  book,  will 
bring  down  more  game  than  any  shotgun  or 
rifle  ever  manufactured.  I  have  seen  guide- 
books of  northern  wildernesses  whose  collec- 
tive illustration  suggested  only  the  interior 
of  some  local  slaughter  house.  No  tender- 
foot myself,  for,  when  the  first  shotgun  was 
placed  against  my  shoulder,  I  was  so  little 
that  its  kick  knocked  me  over,  I  do  not  write 

219 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

this  way  because  I  am  unfamiliar  with  the 
pleasures  of  well-earned  or  necessary  game, 
but  because  I  have  tried  both  ways  and  I  pre- 
fer a  friendly  life  in  the  wilderness.  To  kill 
what  you  see,  just  because  you  do  see  it,  to 
set  big  fires,  to  be  wasteful,  to  take  risks  in 
your  adventures,  are  no  signs  that  you  know 
the  woods — and  they  are  most  certainly  no 
guarantee  of  your  love. 


CHAPTER   XX 

CAMP  DON'TS 

DON'T  forget  your  check  list. 
Do    make   your    plans    early 
for  the  camping  expedition. 
Don't  be  dowdy  in  the  woods.     Dress  ap- 
propriately. 

Do  keep  a  clean  camp.  Otherwise  you 
will  go  in  for  hedgehogs,  skunks,  flies,  and 
other  disease-breeding  pests. 

If  in  doubt  about  drinking  water,  don't 
drink  it- -at  least,  not  till  it  is  thoroughly 
boiled. 

Do  be  independent.  Camp  is  no  place  for 
necklaces,  however  beautiful. 

Don't  start  out  camping  with  a  new  pair 
of  shoes  on  your  feet. 

Do  keep  from  adding  to  the  things  you 

221 


VACATION    CAMPING    FOR    GIRLS 

want  to  take  with  you,  or  you  won't  be  able 
to  reach  the  'jumping  off"  place. 

Don't  forget  your  fly  "dope." 

If  your  appetite  is  good,  be  polite  to  the 
cook. 

Don't  forget  the  box  of  matches. 

Don't  be  foolhardy.  It  might  take  too 
long  to  find  you.  If  you  feel  that  way,  have 
somebody  attach  a  tump  line  to  you. 

If  you  have  an  open  stove,  when  you  go 
off  for  the  day,  be  sure  to  close  it. 

Don't  be  afraid  to  ask  questions — every- 
body does. 

Do  help'  others  with  the  work. 

Don't  cut  your  foot  with  the  axe.  It  will 
not  add  to  the  pleasures  of  camp  life. 

Dish-washing  is  not  pleasant  work.  Do 
your  share  just  the  same. 

Don't  step  on  the  gunwale  of  the  canoe, 
and  upset  it,  or  trip  over  a  thwart.  The 
canoe  is  a  ticklish  craft. 

Do  conform  to  the  camp  routine.  Don't 

222 


CAMP    DONT'S 

keep  the  dinner  waiting,  delay  the  fishing 
expedition,  or  call  out  a  search  party. 

Don't  be  ignorant  of  the  topography  of 
the  region  in  which  you  camp.  By  not  study- 
ing the  map  for  yourself,  you  will  give  others 
a  lot  of  trouble. 

Listen  to  what  your  guide  says. 

Remember,  I  shall  be  glad  to  answer  brief, 
pointed  questions,  addressed  to  me  at 

CAMP  RUNWAY, 
Moosehead  Lake,  Greenville,  Maine. 


THE    END 


INDEX 


Beavers,  88-89 

Beds: 

bough  beds,  97-100 
browse  bed,  100,  101 
sleeping  bags,  103 

Birch  bark,  9,  40 

Black  flies,  10-11 

Blankets,  21 

Bloomers,  4,   18-19.  See 
Clothing 

Blouse,   4,    19,   22.     See 
Clothing 

Books,    20-21,    219 

Breck's  fly  "dope,"  102 

Breck's     "Way     of     the 
Woods,"  7,  26,  45, 

63 

Camera    film,    20,    218- 

219 
Camp    Fire    Girls,     n, 

"5 


Camp  habit,  139-146 
Camping    grounds,     68- 


sites  to  be  avoided  for, 

73 
sites  to  be  chosen  for, 

73-76,  181-192 
Can     opener,     8.       See 

Cooking  utensils 
Canoes,    193-208 
care  in  handling,  193- 

200 

cost  of,  196 
length  of  paddle,  195 
paddling,    200 
Cascara  sagrada,  5 
Check  lists,  I,  96 
Cleanliness,  147-156, 

168 
Clothing,  1-5,  13-20,  21- 

23,    165-166 
gloves,  5 


225 


INDEX 


Clothing,    hunting    suit, 

cost  of,  1 8 
jacket,   1 8 
Cold  cream,  5 
Combination    suits,    3-4, 

17,  165-166 
Cook,  37-45 
Cooking  utensils,  8,  34- 

35,  62,  104-105 
Cooler,  8,  32-34 

Dishes,  8,  35 
Duffle  bag,  2,  14 

Economy,  5,  107-117 
Equipment,  2,  8-9 

cost  of,  8 

poncho,  100 

tents,  no-ill, 

tools,  9,  35 
Expenses,   107-117 

for  food,  114 

for   party   of   four   or 
five,  108-111 

for  tents,  no 

Feet,  care  of,  19 
Fires,  11,  77-86 


Fishing,  193-208: 

fly,    202-204 
Fishing      tackle,       200, 

204-208 
Fly  "dope,"  9,  35,   101- 

IO2 

Food,  i,  6-8,  24-36 

bacon,  28 

butter,  29 

cleanliness  of,   30-31 

dried  vegetables,  26-27 

flour,  27 

meat,  28-30 

milk,  32,  37,  114-116 

portage  of,  24 
Footgear,  2,  3,  14-16 
Fry    pans,    8,    62.     See 

Cooking  utensils 
Fuel,  9-10,  40-42 
Furnishings,    n,  94-106 

Gloves,  5.    See  Clothing 

Guides,  69,  85,   118-126 

assistance  to,  123-125, 

145 
character  of,  122-123 

duties  of,  119-121 


226 


INDEX 


Hat,  4,  19 
Head  net,   IOI 
Health : 

clean-working      diges- 
tion and,  166-168 
eating  and,  169 
hygiene  and,   127-138 
physical    culture  drill 

and,  161-165 
rules  for,  159-161 
water  and,  10,  42-44, 

76,   157-170 
Hunting  suit,    18.     See 

Clothing 

Hygiene,    127-138.     See 
Health 

Jacket,   1 8.     See  Cloth- 
ing 

Knives,  8.     See  Cooking 
utensils 


Matches,  40 
Moccasins,    2,    16. 

Footgear 
Mosquitoes,  10-11 


See 


Mosquitoes,    h  e  a  d  n  e  t 
and,  101.    See  Hat 
netting  for,  35 
tarlatan  for,  101 


Neat's-foot  oil.  See  Wa- 
terproofing 
Nesting  pails,  8,  34 

Pockets,  4.  See  Clothing 
Poncho,  100 
Privy,  care  of,  168.    See 
Sanitation 

Recipes,  45 

apples,  49 

bacon,  62 

baked  beans,  59-60 

baking  powder  bis- 
cuits, 55-56 

boiling  vegetables,  65- 
66 

bread-making,  51 

broth,  62 

buckwheat  cakes,  61 

Chinese  tea-cakes,  63 

chowder,  62-63 


227 


INDEX 


Recipes : 

corn  bread,  56-57 

corn  meal,  48 

corn  pone,  60-6 1 

eggs,  54-55 

fish,  52-53 

fudge,  64-65 

gingerbread,  63 

macaroni,  48 

mashed  potatoes,  61-62 

mayonnaise     dressing, 
66 

molasses  cookies,  64 

mushrooms,  61-62 

olive  oil,  65 

pancakes,  57-58 

partridge,  53-54 

penuche,  64 

rice,  48 

soups,  58,  59 

stewed  fruits,  65 

stock,  46 

vegetable  stew,  49 

white  sauce,  63 
Reflector    baker,    8,    39. 
See    Cooking    uten- 
sils 


Safety     pins,     5.       See 

Clothing 

Sanitation,  camp  health 
and,   157-170 
water  and,  10,  30-31, 

42-44,  76 
Skirt,  4,  17-19 

extra.     See  Clothing 
khaki,  17 
tweed,  17,  22 
Soap,  5,  20 
Sporting     catalogs, 

103 

Sporting  magazines, 
Outing,  Country 
Life  in  America, 
Forest  and  Stream, 
Field  and  Stream, 
Recreation,  Rod 
and  Gun  in  Can- 
ada, HO 

Stockings,  3.  See  Cloth- 
ing 

holeproof,  1 6,  17,  19 
woolen,  1 6 

Sweater,  18.  See  Cloth- 
ing 


228 


INDEX 


Tents,  no-iii.  See 
Equipment  and 
also  Expenses 

Tin  can  camping,  26 

Tools,  9,  35.  See 
Equipment 

Tooth  brush,  5 

Tooth  paste,  5 

Trail,  209-220 

following     the,     211- 

214 

independence  on,  209- 
211 


Trail,  lost   on,   214-216 
walking,   70 

Vacation  Bureaus,   115 
Viscol.     See    Water- 
proofing 

Water,    10,    42-44,    76. 

See  Health  and  also 

Sanitation 
Waterproofing,     3,      14, 

1 6.    See  Footgear 


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